Naam Iruvar Quotes

#1. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#2. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#3. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#4. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#5. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

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

#7. I was editing for Kunal Kapoor when I got my first film 'Jaan Tere Naam' as lead actor. #Quote by Ronit Roy

#8. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#9. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#10. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#11. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#12. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#13. The final frontier of the digital technology is integrating into your own brain. #Quote by Ramez Naam

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

#15. Computing technology started out as number-crunching. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#16. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#17. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

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

#19. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#20. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

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

#22. The past was read-only. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#23. 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.' #Quote by Ramez Naam

#24. We don't have good global policies in place for climate. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#25. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#26. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#27. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#28. To understand the future course of this war, one need only look at the history of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Like those two manufactured "wars", this one will be never-ending, freedom-destroying, counterproductive, and ultimately understood to have caused far more damage than the supposed threat it was aimed at ever could have. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#29. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#30. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#31. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#32. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#33. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#34. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#35. 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. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#36. After the debacle of the party, debugging the code running in his own brain was bliss. His body lay safely in his bed. His mind exulted inside the Nexus development environment, tracing the events that had led to the fault. Here he was in his element. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#37. Each additional idea is a gift to the future. Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#38. Environmental concern is a phenomena that tends to rise in a nation after a certain level of wealth. #Quote by Ramez Naam

#39. 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? #Quote by Ramez Naam