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.

Ramez Naam

We've seen over time that countries that have the best economic growth are those that have good governance, and good governance comes from freedom of communication. It comes from ending corruption. It comes from a populace that can go online and say, 'This politician is corrupt, this administrator, or this public official is corrupt.'

Ramez Naam

Solar power is going to be absolutely essential to meeting growing energy demands while staving off climate change.

Ramez Naam

There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says, 'Don't worry - everything will be just fine,' and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.

Ramez Naam

If you had no new technology, and you powered society as we do today - mostly by fossil fuels - you'd have only two choices: Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet.

Ramez Naam

The final frontier of the digital technology is integrating into your own brain.

Ramez Naam

Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all five senses; augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy - sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others.

Ramez Naam

On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more.

Ramez Naam

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.

Ramez Naam

In a VR setting, you tilt your head up, and you really have the vertigo and the sense that it goes up to infinity, and it's like you're in New York City or Dubai, and you're looking up at a giant skyscraper. You have a sense of awe.

Ramez Naam

Americans mostly now believe the climate is changing. They believe that humans are causing it, and they believe that it is a risk. But in surveys, Americans are not willing to pay higher energy prices to tackle the problem.

Ramez Naam

Orange juice from concentrate is labeled. Food coloring Red #5 is labeled. Fish are labeled as to whether they've been previously frozen. To a consumer, there's no plausible reason why these factors should be on a food ingredient label while the presence of GMOs shouldn't be.

Ramez Naam

We're going to lose more species, acidify the oceans more, do damage that it will take millions of years - if not longer - to unwind. Exactly how much damage will we do? How deep will those scars run? We don't know yet. But we will turn the ship.

Ramez Naam

We know the climate is changing. We don't know if it will be really bad or nearly apocalyptic. Both are within the realm of possibility.

Ramez Naam

Many of the most science-fictional tools to fight climate change are untested, are almost impossible to truly test at planetary scale - we only have one planet after all. We're better off cutting our emissions so we don't need them.

Ramez Naam

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.

Ramez Naam

Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.

Ramez Naam

When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.

Ramez Naam

You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions, and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach. That means new technologies.

Ramez Naam

In the end, our minds and their ability to create new ideas are the ultimate source of all human wealth. That's a resource nearly without limit.

Ramez Naam

We have to slow down the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from coal burning, oil and eventually natural gas... And the best ways to do that are energy efficiency and a switch to renewables.

Ramez Naam