Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think people who have all kinds of debilitating mobility issues will benefit from robotic augmentation. That is, even before we get into organ replacement and organ printing and synthetic biology and so on and so forth.
I prefer the word 'journeyman' to 'journalist' because I think that certainly, when you hear a story, you want to hear certain facts. But I also think what makes a story interesting is the points of view expressed therein.
Not too many people in cocktail parties are aware of Bioprinting and growing organs, or the coming technological singularity; I've seen very little philosophical speculation about how far we can go, how much we could achieve.
We're the first technology-creating species. We use technology to extend our reach. We didn't stay in the caves, and we haven't stayed on the planet. To play jazz with our genomes and the universe might ultimately be what we're all about.
We are using all of our brain, all of the time; all of it is in use. However, you could probably argue that we don't use it effectively. Some of us are not trained to use our brains to their full potential. But definitely, all of it is there.
Imagine something a million times more powerful than your smartphone that is the size of a brain cell interfacing with your biological neurons. That will be the complete symbiosis. That will be when we augment our brains at the level of the neuron.
We live in a world where, for whatever reason, the conversations that tend to stick are the ones where 'if it bleeds, it leads.' But we've always been afraid of new technologies in spite of the fact that they've helped improve our lives in countless ways.
My mom always used to tell me, "Do what you love and be kind." And I discovered video at a very early age, and so my love was ideas and video. I thought what I wanted my career to be was, I wanted to create contexts in which I could philosophize out loud.
I think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it...forever. Or at least I'm going to try.'
By cultivating rich social networks, by cultivating weak ties, not just close ties but the weak ties, by becoming connectors and by connecting others so that they connect us, we create a world in which these self-amplifying feedback loops feed on top of each other.
Movies have these transcendent moments where everything is just right, from the dialogue to the music to the lighting to the narrative context; everything is just perfect, and something magical happens - the film breaks through the screen and does something to you.
Mindgasm (noun) - An exhilarating neurostorm of intense intellectual pleasure. Fully revelatory understanding of a certain topic. Involuntary contractions of brain muscles usually accompanied by the overwhelming sensation of truth proximity. Visionarism. State of awe.
I've built a network that curates interestingness. In my universe, it encompasses thousands and thousands of filters and people, each person being a filter. So it's kinda cool. Like I've created my own utopia, removing the boring stuff and showing only the amazing stuff.
I think it would be nice to have a guilt free possibility to act out all kinds of sexual fantasies... So that I think is appealing. And today the only thing that exists like that is called a whorehouse... Where you still feel like you're exploiting so I don't want to do that.
Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the adjacent possible. We didnt stay in the caves. We didnt stay on the planet, and soon we wont stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet.
It is innate in our species to be cyborgian in nature. We have been in the self amplifying feedback loop with our tools since stone tools, and since the written word, and what we are seeing now is just a deepening of that. But it has always been the case. We have always done this.
Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the 'adjacent possible.' We didn't stay in the caves. We didn't stay on the planet, and soon we won't stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet.
I love that you can shoot something on your phone, or shoot something on these small Cannon cameras, and edit it overnight and get it out there the next day and potentially go viral. And that's huge. It really takes the middle-man out. It allows anybody to become a content creator.
Death is not necessarily what gives meaning to life LIFE gives meaning to life, and what we do with life, which is to create knowledge like music, art, science To this end, I believe intelligent life might be evolution's secret weapon: the ultimate hack that might help us transcend entropy.
I was at the University of Miami, and I still had, like, a semester or so left. And through the film school, I found out that Al Gore was launching a new TV network; they were looking for passionate young storytellers to transform television, which was, like, ambiguous but magnificent-sounding.
We have all kinds of limitations as human beings. I mean we can't see the whole electromagnetic spectrum; we can't see the very small; we can't see the very far. So we compensate for these short comings with technological scaffoldings. The microscope allows us to extend our vision into the micro-sphere.
Cinema is a technologically mediated dreamspace, a way to access, a portal to the numinous that unfolded in the fourth dimension, so cinema became sort of a waking dream where we can travel in space and time, where we can travel in mind. This became more than virtual reality, this became a real virtuality.
Look at the evidence and to be willing to question your own truths, and to be willing to scrutinize things that you hold dearly because that way, that transparency, that self-awareness, will protect you from ever becoming somebody that whose beliefs somehow make them have myopic vision about what could be.
I think that human beings have gotten as far as we've gotten because of our adaptability, our ability to adapt, and our ability to dovetail our technologies - our brains to our tools. With the Industrial Revolution, we transcended the limits of our muscles. With the digital revolution, we transcend the limits of our minds.
Technology sometimes gets a bad rap because of certain consequences that it's had on the environment and unforeseen problems, but we shouldn't use it as an excuse to reject our tools; rather, we should decide that we need to make better tools to solve the problems caused by the initial tools in a progressive wave of innovation.
Consciousness, when its unburdened by the body, is something thats ecstatic; we use the mind to watch the mind, and thats the meta-nature of our consciousness; we know that we know that we know, and thats such a delicious feeling, but when its unburdened by biology and entropy, it becomes more than delicious: it becomes magical.
I remember my mentor once said, "The low road is crowded. The high road is wide open. So let's try to take the high road." I think that people are hungry for content that enriches and expires. You can entertain people while still expanding their horizons. You don't have to have it be a race to the bottom with reality television.
Consciousness, when it's unburdened by the body, is something that's ecstatic; we use the mind to watch the mind, and that's the meta-nature of our consciousness; we know that we know that we know, and that's such a delicious feeling, but when it's unburdened by biology and entropy, it becomes more than delicious: it becomes magical.
Alistair Crowley used to define magic as anything in which you can exercise your will in the world through the use of your mind. So what's the magical way of opening or closing that door? Well, to will your body to stand up and close or open that door, that's magic. With the iPhone, it's like you put your intent into it, and it helps you exercise that intent in the world.
The phone is gonna disappear. Maybe it will be a bracelet. After the bracelet it will be a blood cell sized device that maybe gets installed. We already have people with Parkinson's that have chips installed in their brain to control their tremors. We already see people have pacemakers to help their heartbeats. I mean we're already putting these technologies into our bodies. It is only going to deepen.
A young person in Africa with a smartphone has more communications technology than the U.S. president had 25 years ago. So if the tools to change the world are now in everyone's hands, then the individuals now have the power that only governments and corporations used to have a couple of decades ago. I get excited by how that increases our capacity to be creative, and how that increases our capacity to create transformative things in the world.
We have all kinds of limitations as human beings. I mean we can't see the whole electromagnetic spectrum, we can't see the very small, we can't see the very far. So we compensate for these short comings with technological scaffoldings. The microscope allows us to extend our vision into the microsphere. The telescope allows us to extend our vision into the macrosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope extends our optic nerve into space, and it allows us to mainline space and time through our optic nerve.
It's kind of depressing when you hear the anti-science rhetoric in America, but I think that people are just afraid of change, and I think they're afraid of disruption, and I think they're afraid of the feeling that the rug is being pulled from underneath their feet. People are used to things changing maybe over many generations, but they're not used to seeing things change within their own lifetime. The problem is people are going to college and graduating, and realizing that their major is obsolete.
I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.
There is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them.
We have always dovetailed our cognition to our tools, but when our tools start dovetailing back, where do I end and where does the tool begin? It is going to be a really Twilight Zonish situation. It is definitely interesting. Once Google is in a blood cell sized device in our brain, do we become part Google? There are certainly interesting things to think about and provocative questions, but I don't think those provocative questions are going to do anything to slow down the onset of these technologies arriving and becoming even more pervasive.
My mother teaches high school English, and she's an artist and a poet and a sculptor, she's published twelve poetry books. I grew up in a household in Venezuela with living, breathing art installations that were the way that she used to express herself, a highly creative environment where ideas were celebrated, where artistic expression was celebrated. Seeing her as somebody who was always able to have a creative output - if she felt sad, she wrote a poem, if she felt happy, she made a sculpture - I think for me, there was an early interest in finding outlets for my passions.