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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Ramez Naam

Solar power is going to be absolutely essential to meeting growing energy demands while staving off climate change.

Change, Energy, Meeting

Orange juice from concentrate is labeled. Food coloring Red #5 is labeled. Fish are labeled as to whether they’ve been previously frozen. To a consumer, there’s no plausible reason why these factors should be on a food ingredient label while the presence of GMOs shouldn’t be.

I’m a geek through and through. My last job at Microsoft was leading much of the search engine relevance work on Bing. There we got to play with huge amounts of data, with neural networks and other AI techniques, with massive server farms.

Job, Data, Search

I have an ‘office,’ technically. I never use it. I work on a couch in my living room, with my laptop on my lap, looking out the windows. I love space and green things. And I’m an incredibly casual person. I slouch. I close the laptop and just lie on the couch for a while if I need to think. I put my feet up on a table while I type.

Love, Work, Lie

Everything good and bad about technology would be magnified by implanting it deep in brains. Is the risk of brain-hacking outweighed by the societal benefits of faster, deeper communication, and the ability to augment our own intelligence?

Technology, Good, Deep

We’ve seen over time that countries that have the best economic growth are those that have good governance, and good governance comes from freedom of communication. It comes from ending corruption. It comes from a populace that can go online and say, ‘This politician is corrupt, this administrator, or this public official is corrupt.’

Time, Freedom, Good

People are wired for lots of things. We’re wired for novelty. We’re wired for humor. We’re wired for new pieces of information that surprise us in some way or add value to our lives. We’re wired for fear.

Fear, Value, People

But Nita had always seen having a child as selfish. Why bring another soul into this world, she’d say, when there are so many out there that need our help?

adopt, adopted, adopted-kids, adoption, breeding, child, children, offspring, parent, parenthood, parenting, parents, selfish

Do you think that a billion people knowing your face makes you special?It doesn’t.

celebrity, money, normal, people, pointless, pointlessness, popular, popularity, power, purpose, society, special

The world has a very serious problem, my friend’ Shiva went on. ‘Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich — like me — live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we’re pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though…

Playing God is actually the highest expression of human nature. The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to ‘play God’, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist today.

philosophy, science

But Nita had always seen having a child as selfish. Why bring another soul into this world, she’d say, when there are so many out there that need our help?

adopt, adopted, adopted-kids, adoption, breeding, child, children, offspring, parent, parenthood, parenting, parents, selfish