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But
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none of this is to say that we as people should not worry about
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global change; we should worry a lot. This is because climate
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change may not hurt the planet, but it hurts people. In particular,
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it will hurt people who are too poor to adapt. Significant
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climate change will change rainfall patterns, and probably
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patterns of extreme events as well, in ways that could easily
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threaten the food security of hundreds of millions of people
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supporting themselves through subsistence agriculture or pastoralism.
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It will have a massive effect on the lives of the relatively
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small number of people in places where sea ice is an important
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part of the environment (and it seems unlikely that anything
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we do now can change that). In other, more densely populated
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places local environmental and biotic change may have similarly
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sweeping effects.
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There is only one
time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.
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You and I are alive at this moment.
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GEOFFREY
MILLER

Evolutionary Psychologist,
University of New Mexico; Author, The
Mating Mind

Runaway
consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox

The
story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was
talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence
with some other physicists. They were impressed that our galaxy
holds 100 billion stars, that life evolved quickly and progressively
on earth, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing
species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years.
They reasoned that extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common
by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked simply, "So,
where is everybody?". That is, if extra-terrestrial intelligence
is common, why haven't we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum
became known as Fermi's Paradox.

STEWART BRAND

Founder, Whole
Earth Catalog, cofounder; The Well; cofounder, Global
Business Network; Author, How Buildings Learn

What
if public policy makers have an obligation to engage
historians, and historians have an obligation to try
to help?

All
historians understand that they must never, ever talk about
the future. Their discipline requires that they deal in facts,
and the future doesn't have any yet. A solid theory of history
might be able to embrace the future, but all such theories
have been discredited. Thus historians do not offer, and
are seldom invited, to take part in shaping public policy.
They leave that to economists.

A
dangerous thought: What if public policy makers have an obligation
to engage historians, and historians have an obligation to
try to help?

And
instead of just retailing advice, go generic. Historians
could set about developing a rigorous sub-discipline called "Applied
History."

There
is only one significant book on the subject, published in
1988. Thinking In Time: The Uses of Hustory for Decision
Makers was written by the late Richard Neustadt and
Ernest May, who long taught a course on the subject at Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government. (A course called "Reasoning
from History" is currently taught there by Alexander
Keyssar.)

STEVEN
PINKER

Psychologist,
Harvard University; Author, The Blank Slate

Groups
of people may differ genetically in their average talents
and temperaments

Now
we have not only action at a distance but something infinitely
more disturbing: these interactions violate conventional notions
of causality because they are non-local. Two particles that have
been joined in an intimate relationship within an atom remain
coherently correlated with one another in their properties no
matter how far apart they may be after emission from the atom.
Einstein could not bring himself to believe that this 'spooky'
implication of quantum mechanics could possibly be real.

The
implied entanglement means that there is a holistic principle
of connectedness in operation at the most elementary level of
physical reality. Quantum fields have subverted our basic notions
of causality and substituted a principle of wholeness in relationship
for elementary particles.

Daniel Gruhl, a staff scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the data mining system, known as Web Fountain, has been used to determine the attitudes of young people on death for a insurance company and was able to choose between the terms “utility computing” and “grid computing,” for an I.B.M. branding effort.

“It turned out that only geeks liked the term ‘grid computing,’ ” he said.

Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the computer system would “learn.” But in a lecture given at Google earlier this year, Mr. Lenat said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web — a process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.
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During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a sophisticated natural-language query like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”