Biography

Ignorance by itself is not too dangerous. If you combine it with power, this is a toxic mix.

For thousands of years, we have gained the power to control the world outside us but not to control the world inside. You could stop a river from flowing, but you could not stop your body from becoming old. You could kill mosquitoes, but you could not kill annoying thoughts buzzing inside your head. In the 21st century, we are going to gain the power to control the world inside us, to kill the thoughts and not just the mosquitoes.

There is a saying that if you get something for free, you should know that you're the product. It was never more true than in the case of Facebook and Gmail and YouTube. You get free social-media services, and you get free funny cat videos. In exchange, you give up the most valuable asset you have, which is your personal data.

[on artificial intelligence] What happens if using, let's say, brain-computer interfaces we can connect two brains together so that I can access your memories and your childhood, what will that do to human identity? Or gender identity ..?

The last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.