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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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Transcript

I have built out of a lifetime of studying biological diversity, I focused on ants of which there are 14,000 species today known and far more that’s out there to be found.

And I did a lot of other biological work. But my focus was on always on biological diversity. And it was my desire to see that field modernized, you know, modern taxonomy and a biogeography in this old discipline modernized that maybe grabbed hold of what I saw as great potential of the net, although, I have to admit, I’m pretty much of an ignoramus in the field.

Nonetheless, I saw what it could do and I saw an endless sea of nerds and experts, the extraordinarily successful technological and scientific people emerging, and I said, why can’t they take us up with them and that basically what has happened in the last 10 years.

Recorded on: December 4, 2008