Top 40 Ramez Naam Quotes

Solar power is going to be absolutely essential to meeting growing energy demands while staving off climate change.

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.

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.

In some ways, technology keeps on enhancing us, and we embrace it.

We’re fortunate enough to live on a planet that’s bathed in thousands of times more energy than we use and that’s stocked with thousands of times more water, raw materials, and even food-growing potential than we need.

Technology is vital. We have to have development in new technology if we’re going to solve these environmental problems without throwing humanity back in poverty.

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.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

A new idea – whether it’s a way to collect solar energy more efficiently or a cheaper way to desalinate sea water or a new seed to boost the amount of food we can grow – can stretch the physical resources we have, or even multiply them. And the ideas themselves don’t ever wear out.

Genetically modified organism (GMO) foods are feared and hated by environmentalists and the public alike. Yet the scientific assessment of GMOs is remarkably different. Every major scientific evaluation of GMO technology has concluded that GMOs are safe for human consumption and are a benefit to the environment.

Each additional idea is a gift to the future. Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every state that addresses climate change emboldens the others, just as shifting public attitudes embolden politicians and, arguably, the court system.

The final frontier of the digital technology is integrating into your own brain.

Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.

Environmental concern is a phenomena that tends to rise in a nation after a certain level of wealth.

Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all five senses; augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy – sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others.

We know the climate is changing. We don’t know if it will be really bad or nearly apocalyptic. Both are within the realm of possibility.

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.

I’ve tried Oculus Rift; I’ve played with the Steam VR rig. Both are mind-blowing. In a traditional video game setting, in a first-person shooter, you can see a tower in the distance. You can walk up to that tower and use your controller to look up.

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.

There are really two kinds of optimism. There’s the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says, ‘Don’t worry – everything will be just fine,’ and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there’s what we call dynamic optimism. That’s an optimism based on action.

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.

AI does not keep me up at night. Almost no one is working on conscious machines. Deep learning algorithms, or Google search, or Facebook personalization, or Siri or self driving cars or Watson, those have the same relationship to conscious machines as a toaster does to a chess-playing computer.

People are sources not just of consumption but of innovation.

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.

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.

‘Brave New World‘ dealt with a kind of proto-genetic engineering of the unborn, through really, as many dystopias do, it dealt with totalitarianism. The 1997 film ‘Gattaca’ updated ‘Brave New World,’ bringing us to a future where genetic testing determined your job, your wealth, your status in life.

We are cyborgs already. If you learn to read, it causes permanent changes to the structure of your brain for your entire life.

Whether it’s through introduction of the right gut bacteria or direct modification of the genes of cows and pigs, I think we’re going to have to introduce something like this into our livestock – a way to consume the methane rather than releasing it.

I’m a computer scientist by training. I’m also the author of three books, all of which endorse the use of biotechnology to improve the human condition. In the most recent of these, ‘The Infinite Resource,’ I talk about the power of innovation to save the world.

I do a lot of speaking about energy and environment. But that’s more a second job than a hobby. Hobby-wise, I love the outdoors – hiking, biking, kayaking, swimming, scuba diving. Because I spend almost all of my life in front of a screen, time in nature is especially important, I think.

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.

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.