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.
What's the Latest Development? This week iRobot, the maker of the military PackBot robot, announced that it had secured multimillion-dollar contracts with the organizers of next year's World Cup, which will take place in Rio de Janeiro and 12 nearby host cities in Brazil. Alongside thousands of ...
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The story of these economies is well known, and acknowledged. That is to say, these countries have a voice in setting the global economic agenda. But what about countries like Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey, and others? They are growing rapidly ...
The only way China will become a threat, I believe, is if we believe it will be a threat. China, when it is afraid, when it feels backed into a corner, it can lash out and it can get very emotional. So anytime there is a perceived assault on the dignity, but even more critically the territorial ...
If you hold the cynical view that Wall Street is just a bunch of people endlessly trading parts of companies back and forth, well, you don't really know what's going on. Not so much humans, but computers, are endlessly trading parts of companies, and even generating hundreds of thousands of fake ...
What's the Latest Development? Citizens in rural Nepal, Cambodia, and nine other Asian countries have greater-than-ever access to the Internet and all its benefits, thanks to the efforts of the PAN Localization Program, also known as PANL10n. Since 2003, this group of software engineers ...
With per capita income above $5,000, China is no longer a poor country. That also means that China's growth rate will continue to slow. So that also means that fears that China's economy will overtake the U.S. are unfounded, argues Ruchir Sharma, author of Breakout Nations , who argues in the ...
Two years ago Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman published a book called Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy . Altman offered predictions for what the global economy would look like 10, 20, 40 years down the road. In the video below ...
In today's ever-changing and highly volatile world we have no shortage of predictions. What we do have is an accountability shortage. In today's lesson, Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman holds himself accountable by comparing what he predicted a few years ago in his book Outrageous ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers at Lancaster University have developed a video advertising system called Sideways that can change the ads it displays based on the eye movements of shoppers passing by. Senior researcher Andreas Bulling says the system uses a single camera to "[detect ...
Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad has crossed a "red line" by using chemical weapons, according to the line that the U.S. State Department and President Obama have repeatedly drawn in the sand. And yet, the problem, some would argue, is that this line in the sand has not be drawn with a sword ...
I won't propose an answer to this hugely complex question today. Instead, I want to point out some striking similarities between the American perspective on the conflict in Chechnya a decade ago and the run-up to the Obama administration’s pending decision on how to handle the Assad regime’s ...
Everyone's got an opinion about economics. In the punditocracy, in the blogosphere. Wherever you look you see differing views about how we really ought to approach economic policy. The problem, as Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman points out in the video below, is that "it's getting ...
Facebook has made some decisions about its rules, its internal rules, that sometimes play out quite negatively for activists. For instance, Facebook has a policy that requires people to use their real name and so even though a lot of activists in a lot of countries are using Facebook to organize ...
What's the Latest Development? Asimov's Three Laws be damned: On Tuesday New York-based Human Rights Watch launched a campaign seeking to stop the development of "killer robots" and other artificially intelligent weapons. The organization is putting together a coalition of groups from around the ...
What's the Latest Development? With air pollution levels in Beijing and other major Chinese cities at record highs in the last few months, parents and others are finding themselves consumed with anxiety over the health of their children. Some are choosing schools based on the level of built-in ...