Quotes from Ramez Naam

The problems we currently face can't be solved at the level of thinking that created them.

Humans create so much beauty.

She opened to her higher self. The light and power of her massive intellect coursed through her.

Other people will reverse-engineer the technology. They'll remove the safeguards, or figure out how to build a clone system that doesn't have them. That's how it always works. Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't control what they do.

Power is best when it's distributed most broadly. That's what democracy means. That's what freedom means. The right to determine your individual destiny belongs in your hands, and no one else's.

Conflict is inevitable. She paused. You have to decide if you're on the side of progress... or on the side of stagnation. Kade considered that. I'm on the side of peace, he sent, and freedom. She mentally chuckled. You are so naïve.

The qi of the world. The life force of the planet was data.

We have to slow down the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from coal burning, oil and eventually natural gas... And the best ways to do that are energy efficiency and a switch to renewables.

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.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

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.

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.

Ozone and climate are global issues, and it's hard to find a way in which the benefits of shutting down carbon emissions are going to pay for themselves for any given power-plant, say.

'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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

If we fix our economic system and invest in the human capital of the poor, then we should welcome every new person born as a source of betterment for our world and all of us on 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.

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

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.

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.