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.
By Rick Popely Someday, personal transportation may be in automated vehicles that drive themselves and run on electricity or an alternative fuel. But for the foreseeable future, most Americans will rely on oil and their personal driving skills to get from Point A to Point B. That was the ...
What's the Big Idea? Unless you are a government or a major monopoly there are very few markets your company can control. Human capital is a notable exception. And yet, even though workforce expenditures tend to be the largest investments that a company makes, this is an area that many ...
With all of the crime and pollution, noise and overcrowding, why would anyone want to live in a city, when, after all, you don't have to? We possess the technological tools to once again live as nomads, working from anywhere, just as our ancestors did before the Neolithic revolution. And yet ...
On June 30-July 1, Bing and Big Think present For Humankind, a weekend-long science, technology and design pop-up expo at 201 Mulberry Street, New York City. Here we will spotlight those ideas, communities and devices that integrate into our lives, capitalize on our unique strengths, and amplify ...
The Matrix is real... and everyone here at NASA for the GSP has taken the red pill. If you recall in the movie, Neo is startled, puzzled, and quite frankly scared when Morpheus first introduces him to the reality of reality. But here at Singularity University, the participants have hit the ground ...
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 ...
Is 'corporate sustainability' one of those tasks that exist just to be checked off a list and assigned to a few isolated people within your organization? Is your company in the position to do more than just talk about it? Those were among the questions Big Think's Peter Hopkins addressed in a ...
You may be familiar with Moore’s Law. The phenomenon was first described in a 1965 paper by Gordon Moore of Intel, and it spelled out the notion that computing capacity (via the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit) will double every two years. Since the idea’s inception, Moore’s ...
What's the Big Idea? Parag and Ayesha Khanna's new book Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization is bursting with big ideas, but the most fundamental concept is what the authors call 'the Hybrid Age.' The Khannas take their cue from Alvin and Heidi Toffler and their ...
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 ...
What's the Big Idea? What does it mean to be connected in the 21st century? Hope, interdependence, and possibly the creation of a new consciousness, says Tiffany Shlain. Shlain is the founder of the Webby awards and creator of a new documentary, Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death ...
Yesterday (5/30/12), Big Think President and Co-Founder Peter Hopkins moderated a panel at the UN Social Innovation Summit, a private, invitation-only forum that explores “What’s Next?” in the world of Social Innovation. The all-star panel, titled All Talk and No Action? Conferences and ...
Editorial Note: Big Think Co-Founder Peter Hopkins will be addressed some of the ideas discussed below in a UN Innovation Summit panel on Thursday, 5/31/12 There's a moment early in the first Matrix movie when Keanu Reeves' character is rapidly fed massive volumes of knowledge via direct ...
There are basically three kinds of knowledge humans can share with one another: news, concepts, and skills. Most of our early advances in communication technology focused on sharing news over a distance – a good place to start, as it was helpful in avoiding death. We've come a long way since then ...
What's the Big Idea? Jane McGonigal argues that games are not a waste of time. In fact, she argues, "we need to look at what games are doing for gamers, the skills that we’re developing, the relationships that we’re forming, the heroic qualities that we get to practice every time we play ...