You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software - you cannot mass-produce the human mind.
The media, of course, loves to make claims about the fountain of youth. Don't believe it. No one has it. But we're getting close.
It is common, and encouraged by many journals, for research to be judged by the impact factor of the journal that publishes it. But as a journal's score is an average, it says little about the quality of any individual piece of research.
Stab me if you can enjoy it - but not if it feels like a duty. Stab me vertically if I’m lying down and horizontally if I’m running
Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.
It's easier to change what you do than people think it is. If you don't change, your field changes around you.
Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.
But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.
It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
In the future, you'll simply jump into your car, turn on the Internet, turn on a movie and sit back and relax and turn on the automatic pilot, and the car will drive itself.
Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.
Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.
As I look back on the last few decades of my life, I am struck by the good fortune that came my way.
Better understanding of the natural world not only enhances all of us as human beings, but can also be harnessed for the better good, leading to improved health and quality of life.
I was never very good at exams, having a poor memory and finding the examination process rather artificial, and there never seemed to be enough time to follow up things that really interested me.
In German science, we have a special problem. We lose talented women at the time they get pregnant. Some of it occurs because they are encouraged - by their husbands, bosses and the government - to take long maternity leaves.
If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future - and these markets clearly did not exist - what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?
In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.
In the future we'll be able to mentally contact anybody we want, see whatever image we want. And when we don't like it, we'll just turn it off.
