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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Computing technology started out as number-crunching.
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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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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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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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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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People are sources not just of consumption but of innovation.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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In a VR setting, you tilt your head up, and you really have the vertigo and the sense that it goes up to infinity, and it's like you're in New York City or Dubai, and you're looking up at a giant skyscraper. You have a sense of awe.