“But Nita had always seen having a child as selfish. Why bring another soul into this world, she'd say, when there are so many out there that need our help?”
Ramez Naam“Technology is vital. We have to have development in new technology if we're going to solve these environmental problems without throwing humanity back in poverty.”
Ramez Naam“On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more.”
Ramez Naam“Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.”
Ramez Naam“Environmental concern is a phenomena that tends to rise in a nation after a certain level of wealth.”
Ramez Naam“Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.”
Ramez Naam“The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.”
Ramez Naam“Solar power is going to be absolutely essential to meeting growing energy demands while staving off climate change.”
Ramez Naam“Orange juice from concentrate is labeled. Food coloring Red #5 is labeled. Fish are labeled as to whether they've been previously frozen. To a consumer, there's no plausible reason why these factors should be on a food ingredient label while the presence of GMOs shouldn't be.”
Ramez Naam“I'm a geek through and through. My last job at Microsoft was leading much of the search engine relevance work on Bing. There we got to play with huge amounts of data, with neural networks and other AI techniques, with massive server farms.”
Ramez Naam“We've seen over time that countries that have the best economic growth are those that have good governance, and good governance comes from freedom of communication. It comes from ending corruption. It comes from a populace that can go online and say, 'This politician is corrupt, this administrator, or this public official is corrupt.'”
Ramez Naam