Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.

A life where bots tell us what to do every second - get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person - is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities; We have already accepted that. All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn't even notice.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

I think if I were to express my wish, it would be that we are more regionally self-reliant. And I dont mean people being survivalists, I mean regionally self-reliant. So that you have these individual cells. The idea of having different solutions in different areas, so that we have a very robust, durable civilization.

I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.

We need to take a leaf out of natures book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female - making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. ... Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system - not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it.