Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

We should not be confident in our ability to keep a super-intelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever.

It’s unlikely that any of those natural hazards will do us in within the next 100 years if we’ve already survived 100,000. By contrast, we are introducing, through human activity, entirely new types of dangers by developing powerful new technologies. We have no record of surviving those.

For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.