Young voters are crucial. The trend over recent years has been for them to drift away. So anything that gets young voters interested in the electoral process not only has an immediate effect, but has an effect for years and years.

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.

One thing we didn't know in 1996 is that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a culture with online advertising.

In Japan, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what's missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

We can design things that learn, so you can grow an intelligence by creating an environment and creating things that just do it a million time faster than we do.