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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.

Paul Allen

Technology Space Us

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The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.

Science Intelligence Art

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I enjoy creating new ideas, working on new creative projects.

Work Working Tin

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Continuity is important in sports.

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You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent.

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The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.

Tried T Scientific

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Part of life has to be about enjoying life and having different experiences, especially if you're with friends and you're on an adventure on a boat or a submarine - it's a lot of fun.

Life Experience Art

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Some people can vent their anger, take a breath, and let it go, but I wasn't one of them.

Anger Vent Them

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There are people out there who don't see value in intellectual property, and so they're always going to have a problem if there are lawsuits involving intellectual property.

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I grew up watching games with my father at Washington Husky Stadium. When I moved out to Seattle, I had a friend who would take me to Seahawks games in the 1980s.

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The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

Work Pet Computers

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Artificial intelligence... I've been following that since I was in high school.

Intelligence Art Wing

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What people don't realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do - by millions of years of evolution - what we do.

Design Years Year

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Human beings are fragile things, and for the period of time it takes to get them to Mars and back, you have dangerous radiation from the sun and the galaxy. We have to think about issues like that.

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While I sign off on trades or free agents, I've rarely overruled my basketball people's decisions. But I'm not shy about steering the discussion or pushing deeper if something doesn't make sense to me.

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I'm trying to show people that they can activate their own passions and find their own path.

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It's very challenging to carve back market share.

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Some people are great at the pure mathematical things - like Bill Gates, he's great at math things. He loves to do puzzles. Me, I like to look at an overall landscape and try to figure out, how do you solve a problem?

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General managers - I like to talk about the 'golden gut': general managers that not only can have a sense for the players that are going to perform beyond what people expect and get team chemistry right, but they also have to be able to make trades.

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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 Space Us

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We've had some tough times, but we've hung in there.

Time UN Tough Times

You look at things you enjoy in your life, but much more important is what you can do to make the world a better place.

There's a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they've all fallen short.

The biggest yacht that I have accommodates a submarine.

At one point, I was the youngest owner in major league sports.

There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.

I would go in the university stacks and pull out books like 'Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War II' when I was 12 or something, and I'd spend hours reading about the engines in some of those planes.

Traditionally, Seattle has been a great sports town and great football town. What the Huskies have achieved over the years has been pretty amazing. That's how I got my first taste of football - when I went with my father to Husky Stadium.

When I was 7 or 8, I became fascinated with hot rods.

I'm trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields.

I've lived in Boston.

My high school in Seattle, Lakeside, seemed conservative on the surface, but it was educationally progressive.

If it hadn't been for our Traf-O-Data venture, and if it hadn't been for all that time spent on UW computers, you could argue that Microsoft might not have happened.

Moore's Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

If you have the chance to realize some of these dreams you had as a kid, and you have the opportunity, why not pursue that?

Some people are motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place: from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead.

I have to admit, between the Seahawks games and the Blazer games and playoffs games, we're talking about close to 100 games a year, so I don't really follow other sports a lot.

I think, as an owner, you really want to do the team right, the fans right, and the community right and build a winning organization.

Microprocessors were instantly attractive to us because you could build something for a fraction of the cost of conventional electronics. That's essentially what we did with the Traf-O-Data computer - only it was too narrow and challenging an area to try to build a service business in.

Seattle has a long tradition of celebrating local and non-local art - from the Burke and Seattle Art Museums to the Asian Art Museum.

In the university library my father helped lead, as the Associate Director of Libraries from '60 to '82, I spent hours and hours as a kid devouring piles of books so I could follow the latest advances in science.

In the early days at Asymetrix, we were focusing on business automation.

Your dream, when you buy a sports franchise, is to win the championship, the Super Bowl.

Sports is such a cyclical thing; it's often feast or famine. But what you try and do as an owner is build a winning organization.

In technology, most things fail. Most companies fail.

As always, space remains an unforgiving frontier, and the skies overhead will surely present obstacles and setbacks that must be overcome. But hard challenges demand fresh approaches, and I'm optimistic that Stratolaunch will yield transformative benefits - not only for scientists and space entrepreneurs, but for all of us.

It's really amazing to stand in front of a work you haven't seen before and be almost overwhelmed by its beauty and the vision and execution of the artist.

Once you become an owner of a team, you get so much more into the sport and you can't help it. So I really love NFL football now to the degree of following it much more than I did previously.

If you have an analytical bent like I do, going back to my days as a programmer, you like to ask questions.

I have held Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock guitar and imagined what it would be like to play it, but that's the extent of it.