John Brockman runs this group blog called edge.org – the mainstay of this blog is “the Edge annual question” series which ran for 20 years, ending in 2018. This series entailed John sending a chosen question to 200+ experts in their respective fields (mostly from academia) asking them to provide an answer in less than 1000 words. Some regular participants in this question series were luminaries like Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins to name a few.
The question series has been published as books as well. I’ve read most of the question series in bits and pieces. But the one I read end-to-end was the last one, which is called the “The Last Question”. In this one John asked the experts: “What’s your last question, the question for which you will be remembered?”
This book provides fascinating insight into what the best minds around the world care about the most. It’s a very short book – I’d recommend reading it if you like this kind of stuff.
I have put below the questions I liked the most –
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How can an aggregation of trillions of selfish, myopic cells discover the unwitting teamwork that turns that dynamic clump into a person who can love, notice, wonder, and keep a promise? |
DANIEL C. DENNETT -
Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies? | ALUN ANDERSON
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How do we best build a civilization that is galvanized by long-term thinking? | SAMUEL ARBESMAN
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Will it ever be possible for us to transcend our limited experience of time as linear? | NOGA ARIKHA
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Can we re-design our education system based on the principle of neurodiversity? | SIMON BARON-COHEN
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Why are we so often kind to strangers when nobody is watching and we have nothing to gain? | PAUL BLOOM
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Will we soon cease to care whether we are experiencing normal, augmented, or virtual reality? | ANDY CLARK
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Why do we experience feelings of meaning in a universe without purpose? | JAMES CROAK
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Are the ways qualia relate to computation, creativity to free will, risk to probability, morality to epistemology, all the same question? | DAVID DEUTSCH
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Can we develop a procedure that, in principle, would tell us whether or not our universe is a simulation (analogous to the way the now proven Poincaré conjecture can tell us the universe’s shape)? | KEITH DEVLIN
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Can human intuition ever be reduced to an algorithm? | GERD GIGERENZER
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How can the few pounds of grey goo between our ears let us make utterly surprising, completely unprecedented, and remarkably true discoveries about the world around us, in every domain and at every scale, from quarks to quasars? | ALISON GOPNIK
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What will happen to human love when we can design the perfect robot lover? | KURT GRAY
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Why is it that the maximum information we can pack into a region of space does not depend on the volume of the region, but only on the area that bounds it?
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How does a thought become a feeling? | MARCO IACOBONI
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Are the laws of physics unique and inevitable? | GORDON KANE
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Will human psychology keep pace with the exponential growth of technological innovation associated with cultural evolution? | CRISTINE H. LEGARE
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Where were the laws of physics written before the universe was born? | ANDREI LINDE
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How will the world be changed when battery storage technology improves at the same exponential rate seen in computer chips in recent decades? | JOHN MARKOFF
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How much of what we call “reality” is ultimately grounded and instantiated in convincing communication and storytelling? | BARNABY MARSH
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Does the infinite multiverse of cosmologists, in which all that is physically possible occurs, contain realizations of our unruly paradoxes of infinity (Hilbert’s Hotel, Thomson’s lamp, 1+2+3+4 . . . = −1/12; etc.)? | WILLIAM POUNDSTONE
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Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes? | PAUL SAFFO
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Given the nature of life, the purposeless indifference of the universe, and our complete lack of free will, how is it that most people avoid ever being clinically depressed? | ROBERT SAPOLSKY
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Is a human brain capable of understanding a human brain? | RENÉ SCHEU
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Is civilization’s demand for water a dividing or unifying force? | LAURENCE C. SMITH
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What would the ability to synthesize creativity do to cultural evolution? | NINA STEGEMAN
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Do the laws of physics change with the passage of time? | BRUCE STERLING
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Is there a design to the laws of physics, or are they the result of chance and the laws of large numbers? | LEONARD SUSSKIND
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How will we cope when we are capable of keeping humans alive longer than our optimal life expectancy? | RICHARD H. THALER
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Can rational beings such as Bayesian robots, humans, and superintelligent AIs ever reach agreement? | FRANK TIPLER
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Will the creation of a superhuman class from a combination of genome editing and direct biological-machine interfaces lead to the collapse of civilization? | J. CRAIG VENTER
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