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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

Michio Kaku: At some point in the future we will have robots as smart as us. Why not enhance ourselves?

Fundamentally we are the same cavemen and cavewomen of 100,000 years ago that emerged from Africa, except we have all the gizmos and gadgets of today, but our basic personality hasn’t changed so much. People will still want to look acceptable to their peers, acceptable to members of the opposite sex and so living in a post human world is not going to be that much different than living in the human world except we’ll have perfect bodies, except we’ll be ageless. We will become the gods that we once feared. We will like Zeus mentally control objects around us. Like Venus we will have perfect bodies and ageless bodies. Like Apollo we will have carriages that make us fly effortlessly in the sky with no energy from the outside and like Pegasus we’ll have animals that have never walked the surface of the earth or ceased walking the surface of the earth tens of thousands of years ago. In other words, if we today were to meet our grandparents of 1900 they would view us with our rockets and GPS systems and iPads. They would view us as sorcerers, wizards. How would we today view someone from 2100? We would view them as the gods of mythology.

Directed / Produced by
Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd