Jason Silva Quotes

It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that a new technology is very similar to its predecessors. A new technology is often perceived as the linear extension of the previous one, and this leads us to believe the new technology will fill the same roles - just a little faster or a little smaller or a little lighter.

Unlike us, machines do not have a 'nature' consistent across vast reaches of time. They are, at least to begin with, whatever we set in motion - with an inbuilt tendency towards the exponential.

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating- or toward the abyss.

I'm a relic, and things were a lot different when I was fifteen and sixteen. There were no cell phones, no laptops... I learned to type on an actual typewriter.

No one has ever been able to stop the process and evolution of technology, not even I.B.M. That is going to continue. Those who grab it and move ahead with it will determine the future in this industry.

Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.

Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

We are gods. Our tools make us gods. In symbiosis with our technology, our powers are expanding exponentially and so, too, our possibilities.

No particular technology lasts for long.

Vulcan Inc. is a unique organization that unites commercial, philanthropic, research, policy, and technology innovation. Our goals are ambitious - from saving Africa's elephants to unlocking the secrets of the human brain to building sustainable communities and opening up access to space.

Technology business increasingly becomes difficult to predict because technology itself is accelerating in change, and human nature and markets are more stagnant and static. But the dynamic engine of technological innovation continues unabated.

Every time there is a major shift in technology, it's been hugely exciting and scary at the same time. I have seen some really drastic changes in technology, like shooting only film to video to digital.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s Technology

When Colin Powell showed up as Secretary of State in 2001, most State Department employees still didn't even have computers on their desks. When I got there they were not mostly permitted to have handheld devices. I mean, so you're thinking how do we operate in this new environment dominated by technology, globalizing forces? We have to change, and I can't expect people to change if I don't try to model it and lead it.

It seems as though our ability to change technology happens so quickly, and our ability to evolve as creatures is still very slow.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

I grew up in a generation that had exponential technological advances.

But today, just a few years into the twenty-first century, we already find ourselves in a different and precarious position. As revolutions in communications and technology have broken down barriers across the world, it has given more power to both our competitors and our enemies.

Whether or not [the company] maximizes resources, that's the job of the leader. How do I get greater results using less resources? That requires an enormous psychology when the economy is changing, the technology is changing, and the competition is worldwide.

There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them.

Every generation is more influenced by technology, which is always changing faster.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.