Why We Should Be Optimistic About the Future

You want to have a great deal of conviction of where you're trying to head, but you want to have a lot of flexibility inherent in how you're going to get there and what the tactics are. Then, you want to be able to run a lot of experiments against that, and you can diversify your risk against any one theory by doing so.

Globally, carbon emissions are rising and resource utilization is rising. In the U.S., carbon emissions and resource utilization are actually falling... We have figured out how to grow our economy while reducing our use of natural resources, which is a completely unexpected twist.

Every successful technology that I'm aware of, the things that are all of a sudden the next big thing, like the iPhone in 2007... they all have this incredible 25 or 40 or 50-year backstory to them.

One of the things about the Valley that I find outsiders miss the most is that it feels like it's all moving so fast, and yet, any of the important companies or any of the important products take a decade or more to build. Everything important takes a long time, so a lot of it actually feels quite slow. Long-term orientation is absolutely necessary, and I think we probably can all agree there's not enough of it in the world.

Science fiction authors always talk about what's called the singularity. The singularity is what basically happens when the machines get so smart that all of a sudden, everything goes into exponential mode, and the entire world changes. My reading of history leads me to believe we're actually in the singularity already and that it actually started 300 years ago.