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.
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The co-evolution of humans and technology
What if you stayed at a hotel and never saw a soul apart from the other people staying at the establishment. You could stroll in and self check-in at kiosks at the front desk; put your luggage on a cart taken by a robotic bellboy to your room; and order food via touchscreen in your room (cooked by ...
Every now and then, you’ll meet someone who loves physical books. Maybe you’re that person. But increasingly the p-book (physical book) lover is a minority. Ever since Amazon released the Kindle, it now sells more e-books than it sells physical books: Amazon reported that it sold 115 e-books for ...
GUEST POST BY DANIEL MOORE Next week, the University of Chicago, will open the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. The library sits as an addition to the Regenstein Library, next to Henry Moore's "Nuclear Energy" statue (place on the site of the world's first nuclear reactor). From the outside, the ...
In order to grapple with the future, we must first take a big step back and understand the historical pattern of technology disruptions. The story begins by recalling the original meaning of the word “technology.” Before the advent of the Web, technology referred to all the basic and engineering ...
Your girlfriend loves reruns of Sex and the City, high heels and champagne. You, on the other hand, like to pour over the Financial Times, drink espressos and debate the pros and cons of raising taxes in the US. You’re an odd couple but a happy one. You believe in the same values, and you ...
GUEST POST BY LINA SRIVASTAVA This Manifesto is a fluid document, which we have begun to draft and will continue to refine throughout this project, with the participation of many. It is an organic process: all are invited to participate ...
The latest installment of the BigThink Global Roundtable on the Future of Economic Competition asks about the future of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency -- and what it means for American strength in the world. The US dollar's share of global foreign exchange transactions has fallen ...
Reflections on Rapture, Ecstasy, and Technology BY JASON SILVA "All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.". - John Archibald Wheeler Sober, immersive reading is the acquisition of raw material that can later be conjured up in ...
Satellite TV and social media have been front and center recently for two reasons: their role in the Mideast upheavals rolling across the region, and debates over whether social media technologically companies actually contribute to economic growth. Today's newest installment of the BigThink ...
Today marked the publication of the new book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution by Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blasocovich. Infinite Reality gets inside all of the technologies and animation that we now take from granted, from Wii video games ...
Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and contributing writer to Foreign Policy magazine, has just written a superb book titled Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding – And How We Can Improve the World Even More (Basic Books, 2011). Unlike most ...
All of us who take pictures and upload them to Flickr, tweet how we’re feeling or what we’re reading, check in to places we visit on Foursquare or are automatically checked in by friends on Facebook, and update our jobs on Linkedin, are all “life blogging.” Life blogging means that you are ...
GUEST POST BY JASON SILVA Alan Harrington eloquently wrote in The Immortalist that we should all strive to remain, “uncompromising child-voyagers andretain a child's eye view of what might be"... And isn't this what we've always been told: to stay open, believe in the impossible, to feed our ...
The Hybrid Reality Institute announced on Monday that Data, a robot actor and celebrity, has joined the Institute as a Fellow. Data is the first non-human entity to join a think tank with the full rank of Fellow. Best known for his stand-up comedy exploits on behalf of Marilyn Monrobot at the ...
Humanitarian crises come in many forms: the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and floods in Pakistan; the malnourished refugees escaping war torn Sudan in the beginning of this century; the widespread famine in Ethiopia in 1984; and the stream of refugees running from the violence in Libya into Tunisia ...