120 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?