Edge: Dangerous Ideas.

Every year, the Edge Foundation asks several dozen of the world's most brilliant people one question. This year, the question is What is your dangerous idea?. These people make people like me look like mental midgets. I don't pretend to understand every word of this stuff, but this article is seriously worth reading.

A few brilliant gems from the first page:

"The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism... This view implies that any of us could as easily become heroes as perpetrators of evil depending on how we are impacted by situational forces. We then want to discover how to limit, constrain, and prevent those situational and systemic forces that propel some of us toward social pathology."

-- PHILIP ZIMBARDO
Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University; Author: Shynes


"Marx was right: the 'state' will evaporate and cease to have useful meaning as a form of human organization. Technologies of communication and transportation now make geographically-defined communities increasingly irrelevant and provide the new elites and new entrepreneurs with ample opportunity to stand outside them. Economies construct themselves in spite of state management and money flees taxation as relentlessly as water follows gravity."

-- JAMES O'DONNELL
Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word


"The self is a conceptual chimera. This is, of course, Hume's idea -- and Buddha's as well -- that the self is an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes, that it is not an essential and persistent entity."

-- JOHN ALLEN PAULOS
Professor of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia; Author, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market


"We are all virtual... It will be easy to create seemingly realistic virtual realities because we don't have to be perfect or even good with respect to the accuracy of our simulations in order to make them seem real. After all, our nightly dreams usually seem quite real even if upon awakening we realize that logical or structural inconsistencies existed in the dream... In the future, for each of your own real lives, you will personally create ten simulated lives. Your day job is a computer programmer for IBM. However, after work, you'll be a knight with shining armor in the Middle Ages, attending lavish banquets, and smiling at wandering minstrels and beautiful princesses. The next night, you'll be in the Renaissance, living in your home on the Amalfi coast of Italy, enjoying a dinner of plover, pigeon, and heron."

-- CLIFFORD PICKOVER
Author, Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves