Nick Bostrom Quotes

America is the most inventive country in the world because everybody has access to information.

How can the country that created electricity, the light bulb, modern cinema as we know it, and the Oscar Meyer Weenie Whistle not be purely awesome?

There is this broad, broad recognition of how technology is enabling new things. Companies that never paid attention to computers in any form now see digital technology as creating threats and opportunities for them.

In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.

The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we're left with the opportunity to focus on our work.

If there's something you want to build, but the tech isn't there yet, just find the closest possible way to make it happen.

Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.

The greatest existential risks over the coming decades or century arise from certain, anticipated technological breakthroughs that we might make in particular, machine super intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Each of these has an enormous potential for improving the human condition by helping cure disease, poverty, etc. But one could imagine them being misused, used to create powerful weapon systems, or even some kind of accidental destructive scenario, where we suddenly are in possession of some technology that's far more powerful than we are able to control or use wisely.

People like me thought America was the best place to be creative, to be free to create, to have the freedom to be who you are.

Innovations, which are the births of time.

Every time you think all the technology that had been created already, all you have to do is look around and then there's someone new who's born with a new idea.

The current state of architecture and design requires extensive collaboration and an investigative attitude and we continue to research and develop new technologies.

I feel like everybody's waiting for a job y'know, you can make a movie on your phone. And so there really is no reason to worry about how to get in with people- and you can do that, there's a lot to learn working for people -but you can just make a movie, where in the old days that was completely impossible.

As we go forward, I hope we're going to continue to use technology to make really big differences in how people live and work.

In the area of robotics and in the area of connectivity, technology is offering us things that we are vulnerable to - and we have to have a better response than a shrug.

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.

We have not inherited an easy world. If developments like the Industrial revolution, which began here in England, and the gifts of science and technology have made life much easier for us, they have also made it more dangerous.

Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.

If you have talent, I believe that talent will win out. In other words, if you're a good broadcaster, if you're a funny comic, you'll be heard. If you know how to do a broadcast, if you're a good newsman, if you can see an event and describe it, you're going to be heard and you're going to be seen. So there's always room. Now with cable and satellite and Internet, it's endless. You could blog, you could be your own talent.

Silicon Valley companies need to be asked to bring the best and brightest, the most recent technology to the table. I was asked as a CEO. I complied happily. And they will as well. But they have not been asked. That's why it cost billions of dollars to build an [Barack] Obama website that failed because the private sector wasn't asked.

Technology: No Place for Wimps!

From phones to cars to medicine, technology touches every part of our lives. If you can create technology, you can change the world.

The most amazing and effective inventions are not those which do most honour to the human genius.

Let's stick to the practical and the concrete: Would you like it if people lived in a virtual world? If machines were smarter than people? If, in the future, people, animals and plants were products of technology? If you don't like these ideas, then for you the computer and biological sciences clearly are dangerous.