People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.

Is war an inevitable outcome of competing interests in a complex society? In other words, would war be the same even if human nature were very different? There are mathematical models of large groups working together that lead to conflict on a reliable basis. So there's a whole other view of war that is not psychological at all.

I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system.

Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say