Ramez Naam Quotes
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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.
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People are sources not just of consumption but of innovation.
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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.
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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. But to get there, you have to actually invest in R&D. And often that means you have to be willing to spend an awful lot in that R&D phase before you see the benefits.
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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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Wild fish are under threat of extinction because they're hunted to feed us. Yet land animals that we farm are under no threat of extinction. Shifting from hunting fish to farming fish - where the farmers have the incentive to keep their stocks healthy - could do a tremendous amount of good for wild fish.
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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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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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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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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.
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Computing technology started out as number-crunching.
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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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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.
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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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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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The real use of AI in industry is generally for very narrow pattern-matchers - a better search algorithm, an object-detection algorithm, etc. These things are tools which we can use - for good or evil. But they're nothing like self-aware beings.
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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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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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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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Some people manage their writing by saying, 'I need to get 2,000 words written today,' others by saying, 'I will write for X hours.' Not me. I start with a plan for the book, break it down into scenes, and I know what scenes need to get written each day. If the scene takes more words than I thought, so be it.