Ramez Naam Quotes & Sayings

It did something to the temporal lobe, one of the circuits involved in religious experience. It was supposed to put people closer to God. It did that. It also made them slaves. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

If the incentives are aligned right - towards better preservation and restoration of nature and natural resources - then you'll see a tremendous amount of activity in that direction. — Ramez Naam

I'm saying that Nexus may defy human understanding because it is not the product of normal human thought,"Holtzman said. "It is the product of posthuman thought. — Ramez Naam

Luxuries and indulgences were distractions from true greatness, tawdry and ephemeral baubles that dissipated energy that could be directed toward more meaningful and durable accomplishments in the world around him. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

You have to be willing to spend an awful lot in that R&D phase before you see the benefits. When you look at the companies that have really won customers over in technology - say, Apple and Google - you find that they spend billions of dollars on R&D each year, often spending that much on a product before they ever make a dime back in profits. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Never trust a soldier who's eager to go to war. — Ramez Naam

That would've been way too hard. We wanted to do neuroscience, not operating system development. So — Ramez Naam

We've seen over time that countries that have the best economic growth are those that have good governance, and good governance comes from freedom of communication. It comes from ending corruption. It comes from a populace that can go online and say, 'This politician is corrupt, this administrator, or this public official is corrupt.' — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Rangan came to the surface in the mid-afternoon of Inauguration Day, in the trunk of a car driven by a terrified aide of Senator Barbara Engels, Chairwoman of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Homeland Security. — Ramez Naam

The past was read-only. — Ramez Naam

Hard work guarantees you nothing. But laziness assures — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

If your incentives are set up wrong - if for some reason you reward people for behavior that's actually bad for your customers or your organization - then you're going to encourage that behavior. — Ramez Naam

Food production has affected the environment more than any other activity humans have engaged in. Humanity devotes more land to food production than anything else - roughly a third of the surface area of the earth, much of which was once forest but has been converted by humans into farms or grazing lands. — Ramez Naam

In a surveillance state it was vital to reserve the ability to turn a blind eye to certain people at certain times. — Ramez Naam

When the CIA is the place you turn to for moral clarity, Nakamura thought, you might have a problem. — Ramez Naam

We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights. — Ramez Naam

The right to determine your individual destiny belongs in your hands, and no one else's. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

It was a toss-up which was more pointless: Arguing with an algorithm or talking back to his mother. — Ramez Naam

We don't have good global policies in place for climate. — Ramez Naam

People don't demand a say in how they're governed because they want to be rich. They demand it when they already are rich and crave something more. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Breathe.
Slow.
Observe.
Break the link between sensation and reaction.
Breathe into the gap between them.
Blind reaction is attachment.
Blind reaction is slavery.
Freedom exists in the gap.
Choice exists in the gap.
I exist in the gap. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

You are in charge, though." Ananda looked at him calmly. "In the perceptions of outsiders, perhaps. But here? I'm the oldest. I have the most experience. My thoughts carry some weight. When our minds are apart I have certain authority. But when we are connected ... the group mind contains me. I'm just one part of it. The decisions it makes are wiser and more just than the ones I can make alone. The insights it can glean and the truths it can reveal are deeper than those I can glimpse alone. I respect that. I am a piece of this, not its master. — Ramez Naam

Just like you could dump oil into the Cuyahoga in the 60s and let someone else foot the bill, today you can pump CO2 into the atmosphere and let the whole world foot the bill. — Ramez Naam

You're just a small piece. Death doesn't matter. The whole lives on. — Ramez Naam

The more widely you can spread this notion of achieving ROI by preserving and improving ecosystems, the better. — Ramez Naam

TNC was once limited by the resources it could directly marshal to buy land. But teaching people a new idea is incredibly more scalable. — Ramez Naam

When had terrorists ever accomplished anything but to enrage people, drive them towards greater security, greater sacrifice of freedom? They only gave their oppressors more excuses for oppression. And the oppressors just drove the oppressed further towards violent rebellion. Extremists on both sides gave power to the very forces they fought against. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Ideas come mostly bottoms-up. They come when you have a free flow of ideas and you have people able to combine multiple ideas into one concept ... And you've got to have competition, too. You've got to say, 'We're going to have 10 different ideas, nine of them are going to fail, and the one that does the best is going to move forward.' — Ramez Naam

Funny how the experience of one person could have such an impact on billions of others. Pryce wondered what that said about the way the world was run. Nothing good, she was sure of that. All politics is personal, Pryce thought. It turns out all policy is personal, too. — Ramez Naam

On a large scale, people aren't going to cut back how much they use. That's a pipe dream. If anything, as the developing world gets richer, the world's going to consume more - more cars, bigger homes, more energy, more water, more food. — Ramez Naam

She let her practice speak through her body. She was a stalk of bamboo. She was a summer storm. She was a whirlwind. She was made for this. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

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

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. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Will was very British and on his way to very drunk. — Ramez Naam

Computing technology started out as number-crunching. — Ramez Naam

I absolutely hated 'Gattaca.' I left the theater shaking my head because the science in the film was just terrible. No genetic test will ever tell you how many heartbeats you have left. No genetic test will ever be more accurate in telling an employer how well you'll do at a job than your performance at a past job would be. — Ramez Naam

Technology is incredibly powerful. And in many ways, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can actually accomplish with the right science and the right technology. But to get there, you have to actually invest in R&D. And often that means you have to be willing to spend an awful lot in that R&D phase before you see the benefits. — Ramez Naam

Unfortunately, in the environment, I don't see as much willingness to invest heavily in R&D as I do in consumer technology. And that's a pity. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

The conference guide yielded up a plethora of fascinating talks: Neural Substrates of Symbolic Reasoning, Intelligence and Prospects for Increasing It, Emotive-Loop Programming: A New Path to Artificial General Intelligence. How could they even hold these talks? In the US the topics of half of them would be classified as Emerging Technological Threats. No wonder the international meeting trumps the US neuroscience meetings these days, Kade thought. The cutting edge stuff isn't legal at home any more. — Ramez Naam

What I mean is that we all exists as parts of groups and collectives larger than ourselves. Tribes. Communities. Organizations. Institutions. Families. Nations. We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights. We are their components. — Ramez Naam

Often we need to use policy to level the playing field, or to be sure that a technology is managed in a responsible way. — Ramez Naam

To understand a thing is to gain the power to change it. — Ramez Naam

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

Playing God is actually the highest expression of human nature. The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to 'play God', the world as we know it wouldn't exist today. — Ramez Naam

But Nita had always seen having a child as selfish. Why bring another soul into this world, she'd say, when there are so many out there that need our help? — Ramez Naam

They'd done their best with democracy, with capitalism, but those had reached their limit long ago. They'd been corrupted, twisted to the interests of a few individuals, when the greatest problems the world faced were problems of collective interest. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

'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. — Ramez Naam

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

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. — Ramez Naam

The days passed. Sunday turned to Monday turned to Tuesday turned to Wednesday. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

I think it's all that's holding me together," Kade said. "Then perhaps you should fall apart," Ananda replied. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Well, that was a huge step. We had an instruction set. We could move data around. We could do conditionals. We could do most of the things a simple chip can do. We had the visual cortex for our display. The auditory cortex for our speakers. The motor cortex for our input. On top of that, we could write any damn software we wanted. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Today, our incentives aren't set up well - you can make a lot of money burning fossil fuels, digging up wetlands, pumping fossil water out of aquifers that will take 10,000 years to recharge, overfishing species in international waters that are close to collapse, and so on. — Ramez Naam

If you want to feed the planet and keep the forests we have, you need to be able to grow roughly twice as much food per acre around the world. How do you do that? New technology. — Ramez Naam

Whatever my current beliefs are, on any topic, they're all open to being changed by the right facts and the right evidence. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Every attempt through history to limit the definition of humanity has been a prelude to the subjugation, degradation, and slaughter of innocents. — Ramez Naam

Fortune Town IT Mall and buy software and electronics of all sorts very, very, very cheap, — Ramez Naam

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

Agriculture is the #1 source of deforestation. By some estimates it accounts for 80% of the forests chopped down in the tropics. — Ramez Naam

I decided five years ago that I wanted to truly understand, for myself, what the state of the planet was, and when I dug into it, what I found was quite different than I'd imagined. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

When it comes to trying to manage how our entire planet-wide market and all the people and businesses in it deal with nature and our natural resources - we first and foremost need to change the incentives. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

By focusing on teaching businesses about the ROI they can achieve by preserving and investing in nature, you're expanding the scope of the impact you can have. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

Do you think that a billion people knowing your face makes you special?
It doesn't. — Ramez Naam

Often an idea has impact far larger than the person who originated it. — Ramez Naam

We have climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from human power and transportation infrastructure. At the same time, we have 2 billion people who live in energy poverty. — Ramez Naam

And Kade understood why. They were a tribal species. They'd evolved in a world where a few dozen men and women made up a tribe, and virtually all others were enemies, threats. They lacked the cognitive capabilities necessary to collaborate on this scale. They'd done their best with democracy, with capitalism, but those had reached their limit long ago. They'd been corrupted, twisted to the interests of a few individuals, when the greatest problems the world faced were problems of collective interest. He — Ramez Naam

In the food case in particular, one of the technologies that could help there - genetic technologies that could create better crops with higher yields and less need for water and fertilizer - is tremendously feared. Very little of that fear is scientifically grounded. — Ramez Naam

Buddhism suits me 'cuz nobody's in charge. Nobody's decidin' for me if I'm good or bad, goin' to heaven or hell. It's just me workin' on my head, you workin' your head, the friggin' Dalai Lama workin' on his head. — Ramez Naam

In a secret barracks on the outskirts of Shanghai, three dozen identically faced men moaned uneasily in their sleep, tossed and turned from side to side. They dreamt of violence. They dreamt of fire. They dreamt of death. They woke in a ripple of consciousness. Their mother had died. Their mother was in danger. They rose as one, checked their weapons, checked their bodies. Somewhat calmed by this, they returned to their bunks and eventually to sleep. Their mother might need them soon. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

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. — Ramez Naam

I have an 'office,' technically. I never use it. I work on a couch in my living room, with my laptop on my lap, looking out the windows. I love space and green things. And I'm an incredibly casual person. I slouch. I close the laptop and just lie on the couch for a while if I need to think. I put my feet up on a table while I type. — Ramez Naam

New technology lets you grow the resource pie, which is the only way you can get out between that pincer of rising consumption (as we end poverty) and environmental and natural resource depletion. — Ramez Naam

That, to me, is a kind of brilliant environmental ju-jitsu - using the energy of the market and the profit-motive to get businesses to invest in preserving and improving natural systems. — Ramez Naam

We're all born dying, someone had said. What matters is only how we spend the instant we're given. — Ramez Naam