Ramez Naam Quotes
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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.
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Orwell wasn't right about where society was in 1984. We haven't turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us.
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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.
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There's a preponderance of scientists and engineers among China's rulers. New President Xi Jinping was trained as a chemical engineer. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, earned a degree in hydraulic engineering. His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, held a degree in electrical engineering.
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We are cyborgs already. If you learn to read, it causes permanent changes to the structure of your brain for your entire life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People are sources not just of consumption but of innovation.
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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.
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Every state that addresses climate change emboldens the others, just as shifting public attitudes embolden politicians and, arguably, the court system.
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Computing technology started out as number-crunching.
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We must learn to set our emotions aside and embrace what science tells us. GMOs and nuclear power are two of the most effective and most important green technologies we have. If - after looking at the data - you aren't in favour of using them responsibly, you aren't an environmentalist.
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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.
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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.
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Across energy, food, transportation, housing, and all of that, very little of our progress is going to be through getting people to voluntarily consume less. People resist that tremendously. What we have to do, if we want to succeed, is provide more of the clean, non-polluting, climate-safe options in all of these.
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Solar power is going to be absolutely essential to meeting growing energy demands while staving off climate change.
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On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more.
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I support GMOs. And we should label them. We should label them because that is the very best thing we can do for public acceptance of agricultural biotech. And we should label them because there's absolutely nothing to hide.
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Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.
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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.
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The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.
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Many of the most science-fictional tools to fight climate change are untested, are almost impossible to truly test at planetary scale - we only have one planet after all. We're better off cutting our emissions so we don't need them.
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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.