Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Computing technology started out as number-crunching.
We don't have good global policies in place for climate.
People are sources not just of consumption but of innovation.
In some ways, technology keeps on enhancing us, and we embrace it.
Often an idea has impact far larger than the person who originated it.
The final frontier of the digital technology is integrating into your own brain.
Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.
Environmental concern is a phenomena that tends to rise in a nation after a certain level of wealth.
The more widely you can spread this notion of achieving ROI by preserving and improving ecosystems, the better.
I think the environmental movement is now so large and diverse that it's hard to talk of it as a single entity.
Solar power is going to be absolutely essential to meeting growing energy demands while staving off climate change.
Often we need to use policy to level the playing field, or to be sure that a technology is managed in a responsible way.
Each additional idea is a gift to the future. Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations.
Whatever my current beliefs are, on any topic, they're all open to being changed by the right facts and the right evidence.
We are cyborgs already. If you learn to read, it causes permanent changes to the structure of your brain for your entire life.
Agriculture is the #1 source of deforestation. By some estimates it accounts for 80% of the forests chopped down in the tropics.
We know the climate is changing. We don't know if it will be really bad or nearly apocalyptic. Both are within the realm of possibility.
TNC was once limited by the resources it could directly marshal to buy land. But teaching people a new idea is incredibly more scalable.
In the end, I expect we'll have AI that is better than we are at nearly every narrow task but which are still our tools, not our masters.
Unfortunately, in the environment, I don't see as much willingness to invest heavily in R&D as I do in consumer technology. And that's a pity.
In the end, our minds and their ability to create new ideas are the ultimate source of all human wealth. That's a resource nearly without limit.
Every state that addresses climate change emboldens the others, just as shifting public attitudes embolden politicians and, arguably, the court system.
Everything in nature is not just a straight up. It's an S-curve. It arises for a while until it hits some physical limitation, and then it plateaus again.
If you only write when the muse strikes, you won't get anything done. You have to write consistently, when your schedule says you should. And that's hard.
By focusing on teaching businesses about the ROI they can achieve by preserving and investing in nature, you're expanding the scope of the impact you can have.
Technology is vital. We have to have development in new technology if we're going to solve these environmental problems without throwing humanity back in poverty.
You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach.
Technology is incredibly powerful. And in many ways, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can actually accomplish with the right science and the right technology.
I'm an optimist. My own fiction, while it has its own dark warnings about pitfalls ahead, depicts the potential of science to improve society by networking human minds.
Just like you could dump oil into the Cuyahoga in the 60s and let someone else foot the bill, today you can pump CO2 into the atmosphere and let the whole world foot the bill.
If you want to feed the planet and keep the forests we have, you need to be able to grow roughly twice as much food per acre around the world. How do you do that? New technology.
If we fix our economic system and invest in the human capital of the poor, then we should welcome every new person born as a source of betterment for our world and all of us on it.
I decided five years ago that I wanted to truly understand, for myself, what the state of the planet was, and when I dug into it, what I found was quite different than I'd imagined.
If the incentives are aligned right - towards better preservation and restoration of nature and natural resources - then you'll see a tremendous amount of activity in that direction.
The total amount of energy we use every year - from coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, and everything else - is dwarfed by the amount of solar energy hitting the planet each year.
Ozone and climate are global issues, and it's hard to find a way in which the benefits of shutting down carbon emissions are going to pay for themselves for any given power-plant, say.
That, to me, is a kind of brilliant environmental ju-jitsu - using the energy of the market and the profit-motive to get businesses to invest in preserving and improving natural systems.
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others have stated that they think AI is an existential risk. I disagree. I don't see a risk to humanity of a 'Terminator' scenario or anything of the sort.
We have climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from human power and transportation infrastructure. At the same time, we have 2 billion people who live in energy poverty.
You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions, and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach. That means new technologies.
If your incentives are set up wrong - if for some reason you reward people for behavior that's actually bad for your customers or your organization - then you're going to encourage that behavior.
We have to slow down the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from coal burning, oil and eventually natural gas... And the best ways to do that are energy efficiency and a switch to renewables.
New technology lets you grow the resource pie, which is the only way you can get out between that pincer of rising consumption (as we end poverty) and environmental and natural resource depletion.
When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.
I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
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.
When it comes to trying to manage how our entire planet-wide market and all the people and businesses in it deal with nature and our natural resources - we first and foremost need to change the incentives.
What we want to do is put a price on greenhouse gases. Because if they're more expensive, businesses will find a way to be more efficient or switch to solar or hydro or wind power. So that will reduce emissions.
I've always been fascinated by the brain. I wrote a lot about brain-tech in my first non-fiction book, 'More Than Human.' So when I decided to write science fiction, that was the technology I gravitated towards.
We're fortunate enough to live on a planet that's bathed in thousands of times more energy than we use and that's stocked with thousands of times more water, raw materials, and even food-growing potential than we need.