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
Every baby born today in the Western world has a life expectancy of about 100 years, which means it will be alive in 2110. It’s nearly impossible to forecast in detail life in 2110. However, what we can venture to guess based on current trends is that humans will still populate the planet, as will ...
Flash question: does the Internet help dictators or undermine them? Most of the people we’ve spoken to instinctively believe that the Internet enables freedom of expression and facilitates collective activism, thus diluting the corrosive power of dictators. Now how about a slightly different ...
Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day som e . -- Robert Fulghum, “ All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten ” The financial crisis threw a lot of us into a funk: either we lost our jobs or questioned what ...
We’ve always had a strange fascination with watching ourselves. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray famously agonized over the reflection of a hedonist life on his portrait, which aged and suffered at each step. Many of us also yearn for a portrait like that, one which obsessively and mercilessly documents ...
How many times have you felt guilty when someone talks about the grand crises in the world: water, energy, food, poverty? You assiduously recycle your bottles, cans and paper, but have a nagging feeling you should be doing something more. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s hard to help when you don ...
On the night of April 23, 20XX, four Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) police officers broke into the apartment of a popular technology blogger while he was out at dinner. Bursting into the apartment, the officers quickly raided the blogger’s home and confiscated computers, servers ...
Do you frequent porn sites? If you do, you’ll be pleased to know that you are a customer of one of the most tech-savvy industries in the world. It’s a well-known secret that porn is the Apple of adult content, always thinking of innovative ways to provide the most intimate and real-time pleasurable ...
Yesterday, Facebook’s 25 year old co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to socialize the Web. At the f8 conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg unveiled the “open graph”, a tool that allows any site in the world to transform itself into a social site like Facebook. How would that ...
The cover of this month’s issue of Fast Company has an excellent article by Anya Kamenetz on how smart phones are leading the charge in revolutionizing traditional methods of teaching and learning. Kamenetz, who just came out with a new book titled DIY U (a great resource on the future of higher ...
Since time immemorial people have considered two ways to be immortal: through one’s progeny or by displaying spectacular achievement in the sciences, arts or politics. Now there’s another way: Tweeting. Congress just announced that it has reached an agreement with Twitter’s founders to archive the ...
When we think of the Internet of Things, we tend to think of our microwave talking to our mobile phone or our car chatting with our home air conditioning system. Seldom do we think of ourselves as nodes in this highly networked environment. If we do consider ourselves literally plugged into the ...
We all suspect we’re being watched. Sometimes it’s obvious like when you see CCTV cameras peering at you from every street corner in London (London is perhaps one of the most heavily monitored cities in the world). We tend to be forgiving of governments that intrude in our lives in the name of ...
We’re delighted to start our blog, Hybrid Reality, on Big Think. The blog is part of a multi-year research project examining human/technology co-evolution. We explore the implications of our complex and irreversible tango with science and technology in all aspects of our everyday life: how we ...