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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
The co-evolution of humans and technology
A Conversation with William Irwin Thompson by Michael Garfield William Irwin Thompson is a poet, philosopher, cultural historian, former MIT professor, and founder of the Lindisfarne Association – a transdisciplinary think-tank that has significantly shaped our understanding of the emerging ...
By Peadar Coyle It is said that education is something people have strong opinions about. A growing literature has emerged around randomized evaluations of interventions, most notably Esther Duflo’s work on randomized evaluations of anti-poverty programs in developing countries. This is the most ...
By Chris Arkenberg “The intelligence of the city is on the streets.“ – Manu Fernandez Amidst the swirling maelstrom of technological progress so often heralded as the imminent salvation to all our ills, it can be necessary to remind ourselves that humanity sits at the center, not technology ...
Interview with Jason Silva by Frank Rose One afternoon recently I spent a couple of hours with Jason Silva, the longtime Current TV host who’s been making much-talked-about micro-videos about the co-evolution of humans and technology—the latest of which will be featured at TEDGlobal later this ...
A new era requires a new vocabulary. Will we still talk about the “mobile” phone when all phones are mobile, or when they are implanted within us? Does “evolution” really capture our deepening entanglement with technology today, or should we instead speak of human-technology coevolution? More ...
By Chris Arkenberg In what amounts to a fairly shocking reminder of how quickly our technologies are advancing and how deeply our lives are being woven with networked computation, security researchers have recently reported successes in remotely compromising and controlling two different ...
BY ABHIJNAN REJ A Jurassic Park in the Canary Wharf? On the 6th of May, 2010, at around 2:45 pm, the Dow fell unusually rapidly losing over 9% of its total value in a couple of minutes without any perceptible external information input. After a circuit-breaker in the Chicago Mercantile ...
Reprinted from PSFK's "Need to Know" magazine In the future, cities will be judged by their generativity. Over seventy percent of the world’s population, and almost all of the globe’s skilled talent, will live in cities by the year 2050. The globally mobile entrepreneur will decide where to ...
By Ahmed El Hady In our neuro-centric world-view, a person is equated to his brain. The neuro-discourse has penetrated all aspects of our lives from law to politics to literature to medicine to physics. As part of this neuro-revolution, huge military funding is supporting neuro-scientific ...
By Aaron Smith Since the beginning of the digital age, pundits have hailed virtual currencies as the future of our civilization’s money. While it may be difficult to imagine a cash-less society, it’s important to understand that money is merely an agreement to use something as a medium of ...
BY PEADER COYLE Nick Bostrom, a philosopher with a scientific background, serves on the faculty of the Future of Humanity Institute at the James Martin School at Oxford University. He has written on artificial intelligence, transhumanism, cognitive enhancement, and cataclysmic scenarios for the ...
BY @Jason_Silva "He who speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is trying to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring." -- Carl Jung The TED Conference has ...
BY MAX CELKO Mental health and self-improvement services are increasingly accessible via mobile apps. The newest crop of these apps increasingly integrates Artificial Intelligence capabilities similar to Apple’s virtual assistant Siri. These intelligent systems will make our devices come to life ...
More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a percent that is estimated to increase to 70% by 2050. Much of the urban growth will be in the emerging economies like China and India where a new middle-class wants Western conveniences … like cars. But there are huge costs to owning and ...
BY AHMED EL-HADY Have you ever thought what is happening in our brains when we wander in the world around us? How do we perceive “reality”? How can we interact with reality in a dynamic and continuous manner? What is “reality” after all? One might think of our reality as 2D sheets put ...