Advanced robotics could allow virtually any profession to form part of the globalized economy. By adopting avatars, workers could travel to any part of the world, all from their living room.
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A little science-fiction philosophy to provoke you to remember on Memorial Day, courtesy of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit: Suppose you were given the chance to teleport yourself, Star Trek style, […]
In 1923, during an exhibition of his art collection that would become the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, two years later, Dr. Albert C. Barnes told an interviewer, “I am […]
What is the Big Idea? Russia’s lame duck president Dmitry Medvedev is working hard during the last two months of his presidential term. He met with a team of experts last […]
Here’s a quite engaging and very sensible interview with Bennett Foddy on the possibilities for and the ethics of life extension. I would put this philosophy professor in the moderately […]
If President Obama is re-elected in the Fall, he is likely to face a Congress even more polarized than today, with the ideological divide greater than at anytime since before […]
Literary types used to run the world. To understand life and society, people counted on great orators and poets and interpreters of sacred texts. Political, moral and literary power were […]
The Amazon.com founder has pledged a sizable chunk of his fortune, about $18 billion, toward developing new technology aimed at taking astronauts and civilians into space.
Whether the future is a dystopian global class struggle over technology or a Pax Technologica of transparency, access and equity will depend on spreading technology quotient (TQ) above all else.
In this interview with Big Think, Henry Rollins talks about how important it is to travel, and how his time on the ground around the world has allowed him to connect more deeply with the issues he cares about and break stereotypes while doing it.
Facebook and Twitter enable us to share ideas and discoveries with incredible speed and efficiency. At the same time, there’s a growing awareness that our identities in these virtual spaces are being constrained in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
On Mother’s Day, in a sermon to his flock at the Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina, Pastor Charles Worley revealed his plan to rid America of its homosexuals: […]
What’s the Big Idea? At TEDxSummit 2012, Hans Rosling predicted that mankind’s population threshold will be 10 Billion people. His talk was entitled Religion and Babies, as his goal was […]
So the final issue in my class in PUBLIC POLICY this semester is HIGHER EDUCATION. Here are some controversial propositions generated from papers I’ve just read from the class. I’m […]
. . . figuring out what we want to do for a living is one of the most important and complicated decisions we make in our lives, and for many of us, school doesn’t provide anything close to a road map.
The nonpartisan yet aggressively reforming mayor of NYC wants to ban sugary drinks of more than 16 ounces from being sold in various public establishments. We Southerners note that the ban would […]
Egypt has a civilian president. For most of us….so what. These are distant events, physically and emotionally, without much meaning and certainly with little personal relevance for […]
My friend Matt Zwolinski, a professor of philosophy at University of San Diego, wonders why folks who think taxes ought to be higher, like Warren Buffett, don’t just go ahead and […]
People who think intelligence is malleable are more likely to learn from their mistakes, indicates new research. Those who think intelligence is a fixed quality learn less.
What will the world look like without a single superpower setting the rules? That’s the question that Ian Bremmer, the political risk expert, tries to answer in his new book, […]
The United States of America murdered an innocent man. But this is not the main reason we should be against capital punishment. Carlos DeLuna was put to death in 1989 […]
Charging a $100,000 membership fee for an online dating site could be a great way to profit off men who want to signal their wealth to potential mates. But the […]
Two weeks ago, we published, “Is Brain Science Just Hype?,” our interview with Swarthmore professor of psychology Barry Schwartz. The author of The Paradox of Choice and Practical Wisdom (two of the most-watched TED Talks ever), […]
What’s the Big Idea? Our Lady of Lourdes appears 18 times to a miller’s daughter collecting firewood in a small market town in France. A young woman leads an army through […]
Leaving aside a few notable exceptions, the reactions to the latest UN Conference on Sustainable Development—Rio+20, as it’s widely known—read like a collective obituary for global governance. Mark McDonald catalogued […]
We are witnessing a paradigm shift in medicine that is equal to that of Galileo saying the Earth was not the center of the Universe or Columbus saying that the world was round, not flat.
Many essential utilities in Rio de Janeiro are being managed by a single ‘Ops Center,’ a huge hub of technologies provided by both IBM and Cisco. Is this paving the way for a future of smart cities or urban dystopias?
We all have something about the world we want to see changed in our lifetimes. Here’s how you can go about doing it, starting today.
How do we develop the aptitude to separate spam from knowledge? James Lawrence Powell tells Big Think you need to be “your own spam filter.”
A study conducted between 1959 and 1964 involving 350 children found that around 4th grade our tendency to daydream and wonder declines sharply. In other words, Picasso was right: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”