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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We all know that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. No secret there. We can’t keep growing the way we have been over the last decades or centuries without any consequences whatsoever. Now, by some measures, we are already using about 1.5 planets to support our current lifestyle ...
Should water be treated as a commodity today when we are faced with many shortages? The flipside of the question is that we are now looking at even the United States recognizing water as a human right and the way I've been rephrasing that is that we should have the right to pay for water as a human ...
Ray Kurzweil is the author of the recent book How to Create a Mind. The first question we have for him is "why create a mind?" There are three purposes of reverse-engineering the brain. One is to do a better job of fixing it and because that's a business opportunity. Being able to master the ...
We have heard many pronouncements about how technology will profoundly change our lives in the future, so many pronouncements, in fact, that technology has become a 21st century panacea. It is the answer to all of our problems. It is a problem-solving tool in and of itself. There is a chance ...
What's the Big Idea? "I’ve been working with 3-D printers since the late ‘80s," says Hod Lipson, the co-author, along with Melba Kurman, of the new book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing. Up until about 2005, however, "this technology was mostly locked in very expensive machines ...
The first successful hydrogen bomb was built in 1952. But really we stated building them in quantity in 1953. And also, in 1953, Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin -- who gets left out a little too often -- they determined the structure of DNA. And the fact that those two things happened in ...
"For anyone who has ever written a book on technology," the science writer Melba Kurman tells Big Think, "one of the biggest struggles is 12 months after you start." You may have finished your book, but by then it’s already a little bit passé. Kurman, the co-author, along with Hod Lipson, of ...
What's the Big Idea? We didn't used to look at our friends and view them as a rich source for data, but Facebook changed that, by "datafying" friendships. Similarly, we never used to think of our whispers and "stray thoughts" or our professional networks as data-producing entities. And yet ...
Recently I spoke to a conference of leading business school deans about the prospects of the MBA degree. My speech was entitled The Future has Come and Gone and You’ve Missed It. Admittedly this was a pathetic attempt to play the rebellious provocateur to what I occasionally imagine to be a well ...
The future is coming and it's coming at a fast and furious pace. How can brands keep up with this ever-accelerating velocity of disruption? A recent article in Fast Company explores the sometimes-murky world of trend forecasting. While trend forecasting can help brands stay ahead of the curve ...
Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, it is useful to look back at the various iterations of the Internet to see how it has evolved and where we might reasonably expect to see it go in the coming years and decades. The defining aspect of Web 1.0 was search. In other words, think Yahoo! in ...
Humans have the unique talent to imagine the prospective in rich, complete detail. Futurists from past generations foretold a global paradigm shift, buttressed by interconnectivity, digitization, seamless space travel, and policemen equipped with surgically fastened, bat-like wings. Granted, it ...
It was like a "literacy-palooza" with kids "stage-diving for books." That was the scene that John Wood describes as his "game-over moment," or the moment he decided to quit Microsoft and pursue his non-profit organization, Room to Read, full-time. Wood had gone on a hiking trip in Nepal and ...
“The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our ...
Here's the best idea you'll hear today that you will also wish you thought of yourself. Just as Internet users contribute their 'cognitive surplus' to build sites like Wikipedia, international travelers can donate their excess luggage allotment as part of a novel delivery system to move millions of ...