At any given time on the planet, there are a few people – and one is too many – if you gave them a button that would end the planet, they would press that button

It became very clear to me, probably about a decade ago, that we’re just on a trend line where on a long enough time scale I can 3D print a nuclear weapon in my house. On a long enough time scale, I can take a synthetic biology lab in my room and create a weaponized virus that combines the most virulent features of smallpox and the longevity of AIDS and spreads like the flu.

Drones are essentially guided bullets. It’s a bullet with a tracking system... I think they easily end commercial aviation as we know it

Technology is a coin. One side of it is immortality, and the other side is annihilation.

At some point, if someone tries to end the world, it will be because they weren’t loved enough

We’re heading towards a society of more connectedness. Whether it’s through spirituality, meditation, parties, social media, or the internet, the more connected we can be as humans, the better off we are.

At any given time on the planet, there are a few people – and one is too many – if you gave them a button that would end the planet, they would press that button

Synthetic biology will be the first one to deliver world-ending capability to individuals

On a long enough time scale, I think commercial air travel will come to an end because weaponized drones will be too prevalent

I think it’s safe to say that a desktop DNA synthesizer from the year 2038 will be capable of things that the entire synthetic biology project is capable of today

It’s insane that we take any substance that’s bioactive, and then when you take it and put it in your mouth it causes a change in your feelings… and we go and ban it. The reality is some of these things make you much better off.

There’s no free lunch here. The act of creating the technology required to save us will first create the technology that will destroy us.

Just look at how we treat every other creature on Earth to get an idea of how AI will treat us

Naval thinks that mediation, over a long enough period of time, is probably better than most drugs or therapy at treating a variety of mental conditions

What if it turns out that all the things that we do to make day-to-day life a little more pleasurable, ranging from taking SSRIs to using Facebook, make your average baseline pleasure line slightly higher, but actually increase the blow-up risk.

What we’ve basically done with synthetic biology is we’ve taken designing and hacking humans from the physical domain to the digital domain. It’s a similar problem that people keep creating new computer viruses. But unlike computers, when a human crashes, it’s fatal. There’s no reboot.

I don’t think general AI is high up on the list of issues, not because it’s impossible, but because it’s going to take a very long time. It's improbable in the next 50-100 years.

If you look at how much of this AI stuff is being peddled today by people who did not have "AI" as a title on their business card five or ten years ago, it tells you that there's no such thing as a true AI expert who we should all be following and listening to

If you want to get a message out, you have to brand it and put it in terms that people can easily synthesize, understand, and immediately transmit

It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine our children (or future generations) getting cybernetic implants which will keep them connected to the internet at all times