I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.

That's the case with these exponential technologies; our brains, they struggle with it. We live in a world that is global and exponential, and our brains evolved in a world that was linear and local.

A young person in Africa with a smartphone has more communications technology than the U.S. president had 25 years ago. So if the tools to change the world are now in everyone's hands, then the individuals now have the power that only governments and corporations used to have a couple of decades ago. I get excited by how that increases our capacity to be creative, and how that increases our capacity to create transformative things in the world.

Film is the only technology that allows us to share subjectivity with someone else.

We are the naked monkey that went to the moon. People seem to forget that.

If you could download the entire universe in two minutes, would you?

Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.