Category: ideas

“Why do we care about crafts? Because I want you to be thinking not just about ‘how do I write the best line of code,’ but ‘how do I open myself up to world of what’s possible.'”

“There appear to be few things more certain to us than the existence of our selves. We might be sceptical about the existence of the world around us, but how could we be in doubt about the existence of us? … While it seems irrefutable that we must exist in some sense, things get a lot more puzzling once we try to get a better grip of what having a self actually amounts to.”

“It seems obvious that we exist in the present. The past is gone and the future has not yet happened, so where else could we be? But perhaps we should not be so certain. … Our experience of the world resembles a television broadcast with a time lag; conscious perception is not ‘live’.”

“Identity is often understood to be a product of memory as we try to build a narrative from the many experiences of our lives. Yet there is now a growing recognition that our sense of self may be a consequence of our relationships with others.”

At Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, pilosophers and researchers consider the potential long-term consequences of a geologic event (say, the eruption of a super-volcano) followed by a mass extinction, interstellar travel, or the development of a truly powerful artificial intelligence.

“The modern obsession with authenticity can be deceptive; it can make a narrative sound superficially plausible even when it’s deeply false to its moment. The stakes are higher when dramas render actual events.”

George Orwell called it “thoughtcrime”: punishing people for their thoughts rather than their actions.

“This craze for duplication isn’t just creative laziness or a willful disregard of intellectual property rights. It grows out of old and venerable Chinese aesthetic traditions, in which copying is valued not only as a learning tool (as it is in the West) but as artistically satisfying in its own right.”

“A revolution in technology is allowing previously inanimate objects – from cars to trash cans to teapots – to talk back to us and even guide our behavior. But how much control are we willing to give up?”