Data is gathered all the time. Just take your mobile phone. Geo-location data collected by your (mobile phone service) provider is not just about your movements. It's about who you are with and what you will do next.

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

In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat—and some smartass had sold them guns.

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

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.

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.

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.