We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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The study and design of intelligent agents
What's the Latest Development? "Ellie" is the name scientists at USC have given to a combination of hardware and software that together presents patients with a highly realistic virtual therapist. While her rendered image appears on the screen, three devices track and record the patient's words ...
If you missed the White House Science Fair today -- which you probably did -- you can see the rebroadcast below, featuring hosts LeVar Burton and Bill Nye. Here's why this is worth watching. In case you were worried about the state of science education in the U.S., this video will give you a ...
What's the Big Idea? The future is a difficult thing to grasp, and not just because we can't see it. Bringing innovation to life requires imagination, resourcefulness, the sort of limitless creative ambition we today associate mainly with science fiction writers. It wasn't always this way. As ...
In a recent Big Think interview with venture capital expert Bruce Gibney, we saw what technologies stand to go through revolutionary growth. 1) A rash of new companies have sprung up to meet the demand for transportation of crew and cargo to orbit and to the International Space Station left ...
What's the Big Idea? David Eagleman says he grew up dreaming of having a robot companion like C-3PO, but all he got was the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Why has the field of artificial intelligence progressed so slowly, even though we have thrown the best minds in the world at the problem since ...
Jason Silva is an optimist. With a capital O. His optimism hits you full force the moment you meet him – the broad, beaming grin, the reassuring handshake . . . no, before that, in the form of multiple enthusiastic exclamation points in his every email. More specifically, he’s optimistic about the ...
What's the Big Idea? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson believes in the power of science -- so much so that he gets hate mail for it. From children. As director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Tyson made the controversial decision to remove references to ...
What's the Big Idea? Around half of the world's population currently lives in urban settings, and it has been projected to increase to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. The challenge of taking care of all these future city inhabitants will be enormous. Will we see the proliferation of ...
We have all experienced “dehumanizing” technology – software or hardware that seems to diminish our ability to communicate with others or to function effectively in the world. Technology that creates new boundaries between people rather than erasing old ones. With this in mind, Big Think is ...
What's the Big Idea? Visit Gizmodo, Wired, TechCrunch, or Engadget, or talk to "epiphany addict" Jason Silva, and a bracing wave of techno-optimism will wash over you. The future, you'll feel, will be a place of seamless, harmonious interconnectedness in which humans, separated for millennia by ...
It’s a sad but true fact that most data that’s generated or collected—even with considerable effort—never gets any kind of serious analysis. But in a sense that’s not surprising. Because doing data science has always been hard. And even expert data scientists usually have to spend lots of time ...
What's the Big Idea? A lot of exciting gadgets have been unveiled so far at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Yet none of these products have anywhere near the transformative potential of what Peter Diamandis unveiled. Diamandis introduced the new X Prize competition to "develop a ...
The linear thinking model of traditional universities may have served our hunter-gatherer ancestors well. (An elk running through the forest at point A will be at point B when a hunter unleashes his spear, etc.) But recent technological discoveries have presented humanity with a new set of ...