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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Ramez Naam Quotes

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

I support GMOs. And we should label them. We should label them because that is the very best thing we can do for public acceptance of agricultural biotech. And we should label them because there’s absolutely nothing to hide.

– Ramez Naam

Everything good and bad about technology would be magnified by implanting it deep in brains. Is the risk of brain-hacking outweighed by the societal benefits of faster, deeper communication, and the ability to augment our own intelligence?

– Ramez Naam

Genetically modified organism (GMO) foods are feared and hated by environmentalists and the public alike. Yet the scientific assessment of GMOs is remarkably different. Every major scientific evaluation of GMO technology has concluded that GMOs are safe for human consumption and are a benefit to the environment.

– 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

The total amount of energy we use every year – from coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, and everything else – is dwarfed by the amount of solar energy hitting the planet each year.

– 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

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

– 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

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we’ve learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.

– Ramez Naam

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

– Ramez Naam

I’ve tried Oculus Rift; I’ve played with the Steam VR rig. Both are mind-blowing. In a traditional video game setting, in a first-person shooter, you can see a tower in the distance. You can walk up to that tower and use your controller to look up.

– 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

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

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

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

– Ramez Naam

Wild fish are under threat of extinction because they’re hunted to feed us. Yet land animals that we farm are under no threat of extinction. Shifting from hunting fish to farming fish – where the farmers have the incentive to keep their stocks healthy – could do a tremendous amount of good for wild fish.

– Ramez Naam

Each additional idea is a gift to the future. Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations.

– 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

We must learn to set our emotions aside and embrace what science tells us. GMOs and nuclear power are two of the most effective and most important green technologies we have. If – after looking at the data – you aren’t in favour of using them responsibly, you aren’t an environmentalist.

– Ramez Naam

Orwell wasn’t right about where society was in 1984. We haven’t turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us.

– Ramez Naam

I’m a geek through and through. My last job at Microsoft was leading much of the search engine relevance work on Bing. There we got to play with huge amounts of data, with neural networks and other AI techniques, with massive server farms.

– Ramez Naam

‘Brave New World’ dealt with a kind of proto-genetic engineering of the unborn, through really, as many dystopias do, it dealt with totalitarianism. The 1997 film ‘Gattaca’ updated ‘Brave New World,’ bringing us to a future where genetic testing determined your job, your wealth, your status in life.

– Ramez Naam

I’m a computer scientist by training. I’m also the author of three books, all of which endorse the use of biotechnology to improve the human condition. In the most recent of these, ‘The Infinite Resource,’ I talk about the power of innovation to save the world.

– 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

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