Words matter. These are the best Ramez Naam Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Everything good and bad about technology would be magnified by implanting it deep in brains. Is the risk of brain-hacking outweighed by the societal benefits of faster, deeper communication, and the ability to augment our own intelligence?
Americans mostly now believe the climate is changing. They believe that humans are causing it, and they believe that it is a risk. But in surveys, Americans are not willing to pay higher energy prices to tackle the problem.
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.
Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.
Every state that addresses climate change emboldens the others, just as shifting public attitudes embolden politicians and, arguably, the court system.
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.
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.
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.
In some ways, technology keeps on enhancing us, and we embrace it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you had no new technology, and you powered society as we do today – mostly by fossil fuels – you’d have only two choices: Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet.
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.
Environmental concern is a phenomena that tends to rise in a nation after a certain level of wealth.
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.
People are sources not just of consumption but of innovation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Computing technology started out as number-crunching.
Each additional idea is a gift to the future. Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations.
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.
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.
