Archive (Page 5 of 8)

The Conversation #37 — David Keith

There are biol­o­gists who’ve spent their careers work­ing on some species of bee­tle in the trop­i­cal rain­for­est, and they just love the rain­for­est in their bones And they feel that when they go tes­ti­fy in Congress to some com­mit­tee, that they can’t just say, I love it in my bones and you guys will love it too, if you share it with me.” They have to say, Oh, we’ve done all this math and com­put­ed that there’s an ecosys­tem ser­vice here.” And I think that that has real­ly impov­er­ished our debate about envi­ron­men­tal issues.

Holding To Account

I’m glad those social net­works pro­vide those ser­vices. I think it’s impor­tant for the dia­logue to hap­pen that way. But it can’t be the only way for us to have pub­lic dis­course. Online, we only have these spaces that are owned by pri­vate com­pa­nies. We don’t have pub­lic parks.

Making Conservation Proactive

We’re liv­ing in this amaz­ing time. The speed of inno­va­tion has cre­at­ed tech­nolo­gies that have lit­er­al­ly reimag­ined indus­try after indus­try. Technology has improved almost every tool that we use on a dai­ly basis, and it’s time to start bring­ing this tech­nol­o­gy to use for good.

The Conversation #34 — Douglas Rushkoff

I would say a bet­ter place looks like…having din­ner with the per­son who lives next door to you. Knowing who they are. A bet­ter place is shar­ing the same snow­blow­er on your block. The bet­ter place is eas­i­est to imag­ine, and ulti­mate­ly get to, if we look at it in terms of our incre­men­tal moment-to-moment choices.

The Conversation #24 — Synthesizing Themes

We feel that this is a good point to sort of take stock, do sort of a quick pré­cis, if you will, of where we’ve got­ten so far. Because I think we’ve got some real­ly inter­est­ing places we weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expect­ing to get. And we’re see­ing some inter­est­ing poles between dif­fer­ent large groups of thinkers that we weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expecting.

The Conversation #21 — Robert Zubrin

So long as we’re lim­it­ed to one plan­et, ulti­mate­ly our resources are lim­it­ed. And there­fore every per­son in the world is com­pet­ing with every oth­er per­son in the world for a piece of a finite pie. Okay, and every new per­son born is a threat, every nation is fun­da­men­tal­ly the ene­my of every oth­er nation, every race of every oth­er race, and the only ques­tion is how do we kill them.

The Conversation #12 — Gabriel Stempinski

In the future, we have to change the way we look at con­sump­tion. That’s why I’m such a big pro­po­nent of the shar­ing econ­o­my. Because it’s not an issue of if it’s going to hap­pen, it’s when it’s going to hap­pen. And I’d rather peo­ple vol­un­tar­i­ly adopt it now and start real­iz­ing the ben­e­fit of it now while we’re still in this kind of rel­a­tive land of plen­ty, than be forced into it lat­er when all of a sud­den there’s not enough water to cov­er Phoenix any­more because it’s a huge city in the mid­dle of a desert and they have to go on water rationing.

AI Policy, Is It Possible? Is It Necessary?

When we talk about tech­nolo­gies such as AI, and pol­i­cy, one of the main prob­lems is that tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment is fast, and pol­i­cy and democ­ra­cy is a very very slow process. And that could be poten­tial­ly a very big prob­lem if we think that AI could be poten­tial­ly dangerous.

A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions: Patrick McCray

One of the ways that indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions are inter­est­ing to think about is that they look dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on how and where you see them from. They look dif­fer­ent whether you see them from Europe or Asia or Africa. But regard­less of time or place, econ­o­mists and his­to­ri­ans gen­er­al­ly tend to look at indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions through the lens of inno­va­tion. And in my short talk today I want to encour­age a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about this.

The Conversation #4 — Colin Camerer

We know very lit­tle about com­plex finan­cial sys­tems and how sys­temic risk, as it’s called, is com­put­ed and how you would man­age poli­cies. And if you look back at the finan­cial cri­sis, you can either say, as many econ­o­mists do, It all had to do with badly-designed rules,” which may be part of the sto­ry; it’s cer­tain­ly part of the sto­ry. Or it may have to do with the inter­ac­tion of those rules and human nature, like mort­gage bro­ker greed, opti­mism… And you see it not just in indi­vid­u­als who now have hous­es and fore­clo­sure, but at the high­est levels.