Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Jason Silva - Page 2

If you could download the entire universe in two minutes, would you?

My background is in like short form digital media, I call myself more of a digital filmmaker than anything else.

We are the naked monkey that went to the moon. People seem to forget that.

We are the Captains of Spaceship Earth...we have the capacity to overcome our limits.

My mother teaches high school English, and she's an artist and a poet and a sculptor, she's published twelve poetry books. I grew up in a household in Venezuela with living, breathing art installations that were the way that she used to express herself, a highly creative environment where ideas were celebrated, where artistic expression was celebrated. Seeing her as somebody who was always able to have a creative output - if she felt sad, she wrote a poem, if she felt happy, she made a sculpture - I think for me, there was an early interest in finding outlets for my passions.

Film is the only technology that allows us to share subjectivity with someone else.

The phone is gonna disappear. Maybe it will be a bracelet. After the bracelet it will be a blood cell sized device that maybe gets installed. We already have people with Parkinson's that have chips installed in their brain to control their tremors. We already see people have pacemakers to help their heartbeats. I mean we're already putting these technologies into our bodies. It is only going to deepen.

A young person in Africa with a smartphone has more communications technology than the U.S. president had 25 years ago. So if the tools to change the world are now in everyone's hands, then the individuals now have the power that only governments and corporations used to have a couple of decades ago. I get excited by how that increases our capacity to be creative, and how that increases our capacity to create transformative things in the world.

We have all kinds of limitations as human beings. I mean we can't see the whole electromagnetic spectrum, we can't see the very small, we can't see the very far. So we compensate for these short comings with technological scaffoldings. The microscope allows us to extend our vision into the microsphere. The telescope allows us to extend our vision into the macrosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope extends our optic nerve into space, and it allows us to mainline space and time through our optic nerve.

It is innate in our species to be cyborgian in nature. We have been in the self amplifying feedback loop with our tools since stone tools, and since the written word, and what we are seeing now is just a deepening of that. But it has always been the case. We have always done this.

There is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them.

I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.

Alistair Crowley used to define magic as anything in which you can exercise your will in the world through the use of your mind. So what's the magical way of opening or closing that door? Well, to will your body to stand up and close or open that door, that's magic. With the iPhone, it's like you put your intent into it, and it helps you exercise that intent in the world.

I think that human beings have gotten as far as we've gotten because of our adaptability, our ability to adapt, and our ability to dovetail our technologies - our brains to our tools. With the Industrial Revolution, we transcended the limits of our muscles. With the digital revolution, we transcend the limits of our minds.

We have always dovetailed our cognition to our tools, but when our tools start dovetailing back, where do I end and where does the tool begin? It is going to be a really Twilight Zonish situation. It is definitely interesting. Once Google is in a blood cell sized device in our brain, do we become part Google? There are certainly interesting things to think about and provocative questions, but I don't think those provocative questions are going to do anything to slow down the onset of these technologies arriving and becoming even more pervasive.

It's kind of depressing when you hear the anti-science rhetoric in America, but I think that people are just afraid of change, and I think they're afraid of disruption, and I think they're afraid of the feeling that the rug is being pulled from underneath their feet. People are used to things changing maybe over many generations, but they're not used to seeing things change within their own lifetime. The problem is people are going to college and graduating, and realizing that their major is obsolete.

I am a child of the digital revolution. So what I love about digital content is the quick turnover rate.

My mom always used to tell me, "Do what you love and be kind." And I discovered video at a very early age, and so my love was ideas and video. I thought what I wanted my career to be was, I wanted to create contexts in which I could philosophize out loud.

Post-Scarcity Age, you don't pay for things. Abundance.

We are using all of our brain, all of the time; all of it is in use. However, you could probably argue that we don't use it effectively. Some of us are not trained to use our brains to their full potential. But definitely, all of it is there.

I think people who have all kinds of debilitating mobility issues will benefit from robotic augmentation. That is even before we get into organ replacement and organ printing and synthetic biology and so on and so forth.

Imagine something a million times more powerful than your smartphone that is the size of a brain cell interfacing with your biological neurons. That will be the complete symbiosis. That will be when we augment our brains at the level of the neuron.

The camera is my means to internalize those fleeting epiphanies that I was having in my life.

We didn't stay in the caves. We haven't stayed on the planet. With biotechnology, gene sequencing, we are not going to even stay within the limitations of biology.

I think it would be nice to have a guilt free possibility to act out all kinds of sexual fantasies... So that I think is appealing. And today the only thing that exists like that is called a whorehouse... Where you still feel like you're exploiting so I don't want to do that.

The idea that we are the gods now, and we are doing things that our ancestors think are god-like is not a rhetorical question. You know what I mean? We really are as gods.

That's the case with these exponential technologies; our brains, they struggle with it. We live in a world that is global and exponential, and our brains evolved in a world that was linear and local.

I remember my mentor once said, "The low road is crowded. The high road is wide open. So let's try to take the high road." I think that people are hungry for content that enriches and expires. You can entertain people while still expanding their horizons. You don't have to have it be a race to the bottom with reality television.

I love that you can shoot something on your phone, or shoot something on these small Cannon cameras, and edit it overnight and get it out there the next day and potentially go viral. And that's huge. It really takes the middle-man out. It allows anybody to become a content creator.