8 Quotes by P.W. Singer

He compared the intelligence task to solving a jigsaw puzzle, except that you didn’t get the box cover, so you didn’t know what the final picture was. And you got only a few pieces at a time, not all of them. And even worse, you always got a bunch of pieces from some other puzzle thrown in.

Drons change the way politicians think about war. You already have society’s barriers against war dropping, and now you have a technology that takes the barriers to the ground. We can carry it out without having to deal with some of the consequences of sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way.

Whenever they spoke, most of us would just keep quiet, nod our heads, and put on what author Mark Bowden calls “the glaze.” This is the “unmistakable look of profound confusion and disinterest that takes hold whenever conversation turns to workings of a computer.

Do you know what is America’s greatest export?” Links’s eyes narrowed. “Biggest, or greatest? Sometimes they’re not the same thing. Biggest by the numbers? Oil and gas. Greatest? Democracy,” said Links. “No, no, no,” said Sechin. “It is an idea, really. A dream: Star Trek.

Another way of thinking about it is that Kurzweil and others are arguing that my generation will be the last generation of humans to be the smartest thing on the planet. “Generation X” takes on a whole new meaning.

How do you police an empire when you’ve got a shrinking economy relative to the world’s and a population no longer so excited to meet those old commitments?

Does a retweet actually mean endorsement? For Dion Nissenbaum, the answer to this question landed him in a Turkish prison.

In 2010, McAfee thought it impressive that it was discovering a new specimen of malware every fifteen minutes. In 2013, it was discovering one every single second!