It's as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

It's as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.

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.

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.