Think Again A Big Think Podcast

“Are we in the best of times? Or the end of times? One of the oddities of the current era is that extreme pessimism about the world coexists with extreme optimism — and both have a plausible case to make.” I’m quoting Gideon Rachman from a recent Financial Times piece about Bill Gates and David Attenborough. Broadly speaking, Gates is a technooptimist: convinced, like his friend Steven Pinker, that the world’s getting better all the time due to technological and scientific progress, and that our problems are largely solvable. Attenborough is the world’s most recognizable narrator of nature documentaries and, well, with all that’s been happening to the flora and the fauna of the Earth, you can probably guess where he stands. My guest today, neuroscientist and MIT president emerita Susan Hockfield, is the author of the new book THE AGE OF LIVING MACHINES. And I think it’s fair to say she leans toward the Bill Gates side of the spectrum. Given what she’s seen and done in her historic career, it’s easy to unders