I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.

I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.

We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.

I don't think I've had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried.

I'm weird: I like science and math but also like English as well.

Science is telling us that the reason people die is not because some god said so or because the laws of nature mandate it. People always die because of technical problems. And every technical problem has, in principle, a technical solution.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.