Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.

On some summer days in New York City, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of eight million souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn't one giant sweat gland lodged beneath the city.

We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

Success produces success, just as money produces money.

Instead of five hundred thousand average algebra teachers, we need one good algebra teacher. We need that teacher to create software, videotape themselves, answer questions, let your computer or the iPad teach algebra... The hallmark of any good technology is that it destroys jobs.

Businesses might have been helped by the ability to promote themselves on the Internet, but they have also been hit by the web's encouragement of time-wasting by their staff.

We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.

I can't get my head around the fact that the technology of the first two movies, which are forty years prior to Star Wars, is so much better than any technology they had in Star Wars!