As a first-year MIT professor, Sebastian Seung taught neuroscience—even though he had never taken a neuroscience class. He was trained as a theoretical physicist, but a random conversation with some brain scientists made him want to study the ultimate emergent physical phenomenon: human intelligence. “How do you take dumb neurons and put them together to make an intelligent mind?” he asks. Seung is now a professor of computational neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. His career-changing encounter proves once again that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

“Ask not what the brain can do for the computer,” Seung says. “Ask what the computer can do for the brain.”

Reid Hoffman dreamed of becoming a philosopher. After Stanford, he took a Marshall scholarship so he could ponder the great ideas at Oxford. “What I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture,” the 44-year-old LinkedIn cofounder reflects over lunch during one of his regular trips back to the UK. “I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we all should be.” Within months of starting his term, though, Hoffman concluded that spending decades answering a single philosophical question might not have sufficient impact on the world. “Academia wasn’t the right platform,” he says. “It didn’t have enough scale. So I decided I would be a software entrepreneur instead.”

Thiel calls Hoffman the firm’s “most rigorous strategic thinker,” who used his empathetic nature to defuse potential conflicts. “I don’t know what’s the opposite of a sociopath, but that’s what Reid is,” Thiel says. “The anti-sociopath understands other people incredibly well and tries to craft solutions that work for them.”

All LinkedIn needs to do now is enlighten its users to the full power of the platform. “Ask the average person,” Hoffman says with frustration. “They think it’s a place they keep their CV online and maybe have some connections with people they know professionally. They don’t think of it as a place to get business intelligence, to research problems, to establish an online presence where other people in the network can find them. It’s as if we’re a screwdriver in a world where people don’t quite understand screws. If Americans really learned how to use LinkedIn, it would raise the country’s GDP.” It’s a massive claim, but you get the sense that the “intellectual entrepreneur”—as Elon Musk calls Hoffman—really means it. Joi Ito says, “He looks at the world and society as a huge game, an intellectual exercise where he’s trying to optimize for the common good.” Two decades after his stint at Oxford, the big thinker still lives in a world of ideas—but on the mammoth scale he craved and with a bit better compensation. (Hoffman’s net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $1.5 billion.)

Once Narrative Science had mastered the art of telling sports and finance stories, the company realized that it could produce much more than journalism. Indeed, anyone who needed to translate and explain large sets of data could benefit from its services. Requests poured in from people who were buried in spreadsheets and charts. It turned out that those people would pay to convert all that confusing information into a couple of readable paragraphs that hit the key points.

After realizing that turning data into stories presented an opportunity far larger than sports, the company changed its name to Automated Insights. “I used to put limitations on what we do, assuming our stories would be specific to data-rich industries,” founder Robbie Allen says. “Now I think ultimately the sky is the limit.”)


As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you’re going to replace writers with robots?

“I just looked at him,” Hammond recalls, “and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That’s the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.”

My hearing is no longer limited by the physical circumstances of my body. While my friends' ears will inevitably decline with age, mine will only get better.

"We need to get away from the idea that there's only one right way to live," Veaux says. "That idea has arguably caused more destruction and more damage to more societies over history than any other single idea you can name."

Wired.com: The subtitle of your book predicts a "coming dark age." Do you really believe this?
Jackson: Dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering.

Catalogues his amazing race on the web.

Chris Anderson, the editor of WIRED, explores the four key stages of any viable technology: setting the right price, gaining market share, displacing an established technology and, finally, becoming ubiquitous.