In fact, that's where my vision of the coming digital opportunity is somewhat different from other people's. I divide it into three parts. One is the office. That's the one I'm most excited about and is the most concrete.

The more you learn, the more you have a framework that the knowledge fits into.

If we have optimism without empathy then it doesn't matter how much we master the secrets of science. We're not really solving problems, we're just working on puzzles.

Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it's over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment.

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn't necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

The government's ability to select scientists and pick things that are fairly strange, because politicians don't like failures. They're only in office a short term, and many of these things take a long time.

Software is more important than hardware.