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In the future, thinkers and creators, often viewed as not useful, will only become the more valuable.

Change happens through people, their ideas and their leadership, creating philosophical, religious and political movements.

Solutions to humanity’s great challenges need to be human. That means emotional, cultural, philosophical and moral, not just technical - even if technology is used to address them.

Ideas, knowledge, art and forming communities made human civilization. We care to learn, build, inspire, and transmit from generation to generation. Our cultures are our second DNA strand.

Creative and fresh ideas are needed all around the world, recognizing that existing thinking and mechanisms are outdated.

Wisdom is to accept contradictory ideas, a quantum view of the world, where Western and Eastern notions co-exist.

Ideas and theories are the seeds. Some will become trees and, if strong, they will grow, responding to the soil and climate. Many of the most transformative ideas took decades or even centuries to be. In a results obsessed world, let’s give space and time to the seeds of our future.

We are witnessing a society in search of an idea- for better or worse. Society is constantly on the search for ideas.

Find freedom and peace.

Ideas that may seem obvious may have developed only recently. Yet, they have changed who we are.

The most valuable ideas require independence, courage and the risk of unpopularity.

Ideas don’t need destroying to evolve. Rather, it is like climbing a mountain and gaining a new vantage point from which to see and conceive anew.

Develop and channel Ideas.

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One can have a greater impact as an outsider than as an insider.

A powerful idea is like a stone hitting the water, expanding and rippling wide.

New ideas to help us navigate our fast-changing environment will come from thinkers, in addition to policymakers and technologists.

Ideas are like the greatest species - they need no sustenance and they travel through us using us as vessels infecting us.

People live on through their children and through their deeds, their works, their constructions, their ideas, images and melodies. A writer through her books stays alive.

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Having higher education of consistent quality available to all is needed and fair for any society. Yet, it is by having institutions of excellence (ETH in Switzerland, Technion in Israel, the Ivy Leagues, Stanford, Caltech and others in the US, Tsinghua and Peking University in China, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial in the UK, etc.) that countries continue to innovate, advance and stay competitive at world scale. Both are needed, not one or the other.

Life always relates to the physical. Even ideas, emotions, wants, and fears come as images to be realized.

Pure research or ideas may be wonderful, yet need to be tested by the reality of markets. Having customers is the real trial of concepts and the chance to evolve and improve them. Yet, if overwhelmingly captured by market effects, science and technologies will often stall to self preserve after a while, no longer being reinvented. This may have happened as is happening with technologies like AI or even religions or political systems. AI’s were developed in labs, they now are living in marketplaces, with the possibility of dying with practical uses.

The memory of general relativity was developed in Einstein’s head, but proven in the reality of nuclear fusion, where it lived and, in essence, died. Communism went from theory to conquering entire nations, only to be moribund today. The key is to allow both dreaming and theorizing and the test of consumers. Research and teaching universities may fulfill those objectives best as they allow for idea development as well as engage with young minds ready to test these ideas.

All that is imagined can become reality.

Dinner

If I could have dinner with three guests of my choice, who would they be? 

God, but that seat may be empty. The devil - easy; we may have shared many meals together already. Interesting and, likely, entertaining. 

Also, an angel, yet do they exist? I may just end up eating with the devil, with both of us hoping that the other two join! 

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If my choice were historic figures, who would I invite? Socrates, Confucius and Rumi. Three deep, soulful minds, which filled the consciousness of different cultures. Their questions and 

wisdom resonates with us today and have shaped our civilizations. We may have progressed technologically and improved standards of living, yet are we better, more evolved humans? 

Who that is alive today would be their equivalent? Likely fairly unknown figures, just like those three were at their times, and who’s wisdom will resonate and be discovered only in years to come.

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Philosophy: the endeavor to make sense of life and of living; why and how, but also where?