2018 : WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?
How will advances in mental prosthetics that connect us with other human and machine minds change the way we think about expertise?
Will artistic invention enlighten the age of AI?
What does it mean to be human?
Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe
Will the universe observed today someday begin to contract, bounce, and be reborn?
Neuroscientist; Professor & Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, UC, San Diego; Author, The Tell-Tale Brain
Why should we prize the original object over a perfect replica?
Is the botscape going to force us to give up the use of the first-person singular nominative case personal pronoun, I?
Professor Emerita, George Mason University; Visiting Scholar, Sloan Center on Aging & Work, Boston College; Author, Composing a Further Life
Will the process of discovery be completed in any of the natural sciences?
Senior Researcher, Director, The Oxford Morals Project, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford
Why be good?
If we discover another intelligent civilization, what should we ask them?
Does something unprecedented happen when we finally learn our own source code?
Professor of Computational Cell Biology at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf; Co-author (with Itai Yanai), The Society of Genes
What proportion of "ethnic" and "religious" tensions are rooted in our genes?
Primatologist; Associate Professor, Social Complexity Research Centre (CICS) Gobierno UDD, Santiago de Chile; Visiting Researcher, Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group (SENRG) University of Oxford
What is the biological price of being a species with a sense of humor?
Associate Professor, UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute
How can we sculpt how individual brains develop to avert mental illness?
Director, Institute for Computational Medicine; Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, New York University School of Medicine; Co-author (with Martin Lercher), The Society of Genes
How can we rebel against our genes if we are biological creatures without free will?
Professor of Early Child Development and Culture, Director, Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig University
Which facets of life will we never understand once biological and cultural diversity has vanished?
Can humans set a non-evolutionary course that is game-theoretically stable?
Will the frontiers of consciousness be technological or linguistic?
Why did we acquire our extraordinary human capacity for social learning?
Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes?
Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
Can the human brain ever fully understand quantum mechanics?
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute; Visiting Researcher, Intelligent Systems Lab, PARC; Inaugural Recipient, Lagrange Prize; Author, The Nature of Technology
Does consciousness reside only in our brains?
What would the ability to synthesize creativity do to cultural evolution?
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Faculty Member, Minnesota Population Center
How do our microbes contribute to that particular combination of continuity and change that makes us human?
President & CEO, Science World British Columbia; Dinosaur paleontologist and science communicator; Author, How To Raise A Wild Child
How do ideas about biological evolution change once one species has control over the origin and extinction of all other species?
Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics, George Mason University; Distinguished Senior Fellow, F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; General Director, Mercatus Center
How far are we from wishing to return to the technologies of the year 1900?
Why do we get to ask questions at all?
Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Yale University; Co-author, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
Will some things about life, consciousness, and society necessarily remain unseen?
Is our continued coexistence with the other big mammals essential to furthering our understanding of human cognition?
Distinguished Research Fellow, English Department, Washington & Jefferson College; Author, The Storytelling Animal
Are stories bad for us?
Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project
What is the hard limit on human longevity?
Will we ever be replaced by another earthly species capable of evolving to a similar degree of social and technical sophistication that effectively fills the biocultural niche we vacated?
Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School; Affiliate Professor, HEC Paris; Guest Lecturer, London Business School; Author, You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake!
Will we ever find an organization form that brings out the best in people?
Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking
How can we reap the benefits of the wide and open exchange of data without undermining the values that depend upon the scarcity of information?
What is the purpose of it?
Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney; Author, How We Talk
Is the cumulation of shared knowledge forever constrained by the limits of human language?
Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture, Director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab, Princeton University; Co-author (with Brian Christian), Algorithms to Live By
What new cognitive abilities will we need to live in a world of intelligent machines?
Why are the errors that our best machine-learning algorithms make so different from the errors we humans make?
Must we suffer and die?
Professor in Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, focusing on exotica in the universe—dark matter, dark energy, and black holes; Author, Mapping the Heavens
Are there limits to what we can know about the universe?
Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge; Director, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge; Author, The Pattern Seekers
Can we re-design our education system based on the principle of neurodiversity?
Why are people so seldom persuaded by clear evidence and rational argument?
Why do some people act inside the law, others outside, and others create the law?
Will humanity eventually exhaust the unknown?
Will our AI future forms need the natural world?
Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public
How will humanity change in light of the increasing use of non-sexual methods of reproduction?
Writer and faculty at the Graduate College, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign; Author, The Physicist and the Philosopher
When will we accept that the most accurate clocks will have to advance regularly sometimes, irregularly most of the time, and at times run counterclockwise?
Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University; Director, Harvard Origins of Life Initiative; Author, The Life of Super-Earths
What is the cosmic perspective to the future of life?
Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape
Why is Homo sapiens the sole non-extinct species of hominin?
Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators
Will a baby grown from an embryo constructed from human stem cells eventually become a person?
How will we build the tools to maintain the software in long-lived online devices that can kill us?
Co-Founder, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Future of Life Institute; Founding Engineer, Skype, Kazaa
Will the behavior of a superintelligent AI be mostly determined by the results of its reasoning about the other superintelligent AIs?
Is the unipolar future of a "singleton" the inevitable destiny of intelligent life?
Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Translational Science Institute; Author, The Patient Will See You Now
Can behavioral science crack the ultimate challenge of getting people to durably adopt much healthier lifestyles?
Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice
Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?
Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Director of Research, Harvard Business School; Co-author (with Elizabeth Dunn), Happy Money
Why do humans behave as though what can be known is finite?
Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology; Founding Partner, Persuasive Games LLC; Contributing Editor, The Atlantic
Is there a way for humans to directly experience what it’s like to be another entity?
What is the optimal algorithm for discovering truth?
Can we design a modern society without money which is at least as effective economically and politically as our current system?
Biological Anthropologist and Paleobiologist; Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University
When will race disappear?
What does justice feel like?
How will the advent of direct brain-to-brain communication change the way we think?
Associate Professor of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
How do I know the right level of abstraction at which to explain a phenomenon?
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Yale University; Distinguished Research Fellow, Oxford Centre for Neuroethics
Is technology changing the nature of moral emotions?
How did our complex universe arise out of simple physical laws?
Professor of Strategy and International Business at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland; Author, Left Brain, Right Stuff
How can aims of individual liberty and economic efficiency be reconciled with aims of social justice and environmental sustainability?
Director’s Visitor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Author, Genius at Play and King of Infinite Space
Can a user-friendly computer proof assistant satisfy the mathematician’s desire for certainty without killing the pleasure?
Why is the phenomenon too familiar to investigate the hardest thing to completely understand?
When in the evolution of animal life did the capacity to experience love for another being first emerge?
Can we create technologies that help equitably reduce the amount of conflict in the world?
Is scientific knowledge the most valuable possession of humanity?
Associate Professor of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Co-author (with Daniel Wegner), The Mind Club
What will happen to human love when we can design the perfect robot lover?
Why do we care so much about how well we're approximated by algorithms?
Cyril G. Veinott Green and Gold Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont Author, How the Body Shapes the Way We Think
Will a machine ever be able to feel what an organism feels?
Why don't naked mole rats age or get cancer?
Psychiatrist; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine; Coauthor (with Ian Gold), Suspicious Minds
Can we acquire complete access to our unconscious minds?
Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute; President, Future of Life Institute; Author, Life 3.0
What will be the literally last question that will preoccupy future superintelligent cosmic life for as long as the laws of physics permit?
Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.; Author, WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us
How can AI and other digital technologies help us create global institutions that we can trust?
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge; Director, Wolfson College Press Fellowship Programme; Columnist, the Observer; Author, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg
Why do humans who possess or acquire unaccountable power over others invariably abuse it?
Will scientific advances about the causes of sexual conflict help to end the "battle of the sexes"?
Co-director of LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science; Author, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today
Can natural selection's legacy of sex differences in values be reconciled with the universal values of the Enlightenment?
What is the fundamental geometric structure underlying reality?
Is there a subtle form of consciousness that operates independent of brain function?
How can we put rational prices on human lives without becoming inhuman?
Could the thermodynamic prophecy of an increasingly entropic universe be fulfilled by the cosmic flourishing of intelligent life?
What is the fastest way to reliably align a powerful AGI around the safe performance of some limited task that is potent enough to save the world from unaligned AGI?
Research Professor of Life Sciences, Director (2014-2019), Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University; Author, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings
In what situations does the capacity for low mood give a selective advantage?
Is it possible to control a system capable of evolving?
Theoretical Physicist; Research Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies; Author, Existential Physics
How can we separate the assessment of scientific evidence from value judgments?
Neuroscientist; Director, Human Neuroimaging Lab and Computational Psychiatry Unit, Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute; Author, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions
Are feelings computable?
Psychologist; Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; Author, The Power of Human
Are moral beliefs more like facts or more like preferences?
Can brain implants make us better human beings?
Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason
Does romantic love have a biological function?
How much biodiversity do we need?
Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz; Author, Cosmological Koans
Are complex biological neural systems fundamentally unpredictable?
Anthropologist; Emeritus Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris; Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford; Author, Talking to the Enemy
How can science best leverage unreason to overcome the heroic passion for war?
University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University; Research Neuroscientist, Massachusetts General Hospital; Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Author, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
How does a single human brain architecture create many kinds of human minds?
How far will we go in predicting human behavior from DNA?
Do we need checks and balances for virtual worlds?
Why is human communication embedded in the silence of material objects?
How can we achieve closed-loop neural control of human hedonics?
Is a human brain capable of understanding a human brain?
Master of the New College of the Humanities; Supernumerary Fellow, St Anne's College, Oxford; Author, War: An Enquiry
What ethical responsibilities will humans owe to AGI systems?
Professor of English and Journalism, State University of New York, Albany; Author of The Eudaemonic Pie and The Spy Who Loved US
What libraries will we have to build when cloning becomes infinitely expandable?
What is the flow of information through human beings?
How did our sense of mathematical beauty arise?
Why is the acceleration of the expansion of the universe roughly equal to a typical acceleration of a star in a circular orbit in a disk galaxy?
Will reading and writing survive given the seduction of video and audio?
Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University; Curator in Herpetology, Museum of Comparative Zoology; Author, Improbable Destinies
How will evolution shape the biological world one hundred years from now, or one hundred thousand?
Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines
Can consciousness exist in an entity without a self-contained physical body?
Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking
What is the bumpiest and highest-dimensional cost surface that our best computers will be able to search and still find the deepest cost well?
Does every mathematical symmetry have a manifestation in the physical world?
How do contemporary developments in technology affect human cultural diversity?
Nobel laureate (2022 - Physics); Physicist, University of Vienna; Scientific Director, Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information; President, Austrian Academy of Sciences; Author, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation
Will the individual quantum event forever remain random?
Is our brain fundamentally limited in its ability to understand the external world?
What is the upper limit for how malleable the human mind and our emotions can actually be?
Will a computer ever really understand and experience human kindness?
Philosopher, Oxford University; Senior Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute; Author, The Precipice
What can humanity do right now that will make the biggest difference over the next billion years?
Associate Fellow, Warburg Insitute (London); Research Associate, Institut Jean Nicod of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris); Author, The Ceiling Outside
Will it ever be possible for us to transcend our limited experience of time as linear?
Neurologist and Cognitive Neuroscientist, The New School; Co-author, Children's Learning and Attention Problems
Are dreams brief glimpses of the narrative of a subconscious alternative reality?
Philosopher and Researcher, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Author, Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters
Why do even the most educated people today feel that their grip on what they can truly know is weaker than ever before?
How much would surrendering our god(s) strengthen the odds of our survival?
What will happen to religion on earth when the first alien life form is found?
Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero
Why are humans still so much more flexible in their thinking and everyday reasoning than machines?
Psychologist; Director, Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Author, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World
Can human intuition ever be reduced to an algorithm?
Medical Director, Cardiac Surgery Step-Down Unit at Columbia University Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital
Will it be possible to do surgical operations in the future without making incisions?
How do we create and maintain backup options for humanity to quickly rebuild an advanced civilization after a catastrophic human extinction event?
Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan; Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology
Can the pace of human evolution stop accelerating?
Senior Scientist, MacroCognition LLC; Author, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights
How can we build machines that make us smarter?
Philosopher; Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick; Author, The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism
Can we design a common test to assess machine, animal and human intelligence?
Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California, San Diego; Author, Losing the Nobel Prize
Is there any observational evidence that could shake your faith, or lack thereof?
What would a diagram that gave a complete understanding of imagination need to be?
Why is there such widespread public opposition to science and scientific reasoning in the United States, the world leader in every major branch of science?
How can coalitions of scholars who wish to update the content of explicit common knowledge in order to use that knowledge collaboratively detect and circumvent coalitions which are applying narrative control strategies to preserve arbitrage opportunities implicit in disparities between official narratives and reality?
Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics, California Institute of Technology; Founder, AQT/INQNET
Could superintelligence be the purpose of the universe?
Are the simplest bits of information in the brain stored at the level of the neuron?
CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun!
Why is it so difficult to influence people’s belief systems for deeply held beliefs and so easy to manipulate belief systems when little is known about the subject?
What are the beautiful curiosities that artificial curiosities can't comprehend?
Will humanity end up with one culture?
How will people focus more on forming the right question, before rushing headlong towards the answer?
Will questioning be replaced by answering without questions?
What systems could be put in place to prevent widespread denial of science-based knowledge?
Professor of Psychology, Director, Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory, University of Miami; Author, The Kindness of Strangers
Are humans ever really capable of regarding others as ends in themselves?
What is the most important thing that can be done to restore the general public’s faith and trust in science?
Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
How could one last question possibly be enough?
Founder, TED Conference; EG Conference; TEDMED Conferences; Architect, Cartographer; Author, Information Architects
Clarify the differences between understanding, knowledge and wisdom that could be communicated to a literate twelve-year-old and recommunicated to their parents.
Visiting Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology; Author, The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters
Is the assertion "Nothingness is impossible" the most fundamental statement we can make about our existence?
James B. Duke ProfessorProfessor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics, Duke University; Founding Member, Center for Advanced Hindsight; Author, Predictably Irrational
How would changes in the marginal tax rate affect our efforts and motivation?
How will the world be changed when battery storage technology improves at the same exponential rate seen in computer chips in recent decades?
How smart does another animal have to be for us to decide not to eat it?
Director, Cambridge Embodied Cognition and Emotion Laboratory; Reader in Experimental Social Psychology and Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge
Is immortality desirable?
How much time will pass between the last minute before artificial superintelligence and the first minute after it?
Associate Professor of Psychology, Director, NYU Infant Cognition and Communication Lab, New York University
Will we ever understand how human communication is built from genes to cells to circuits to behavior?
When will we develop a robust theory of Ontological Intelligence (OI)?
Can you prove it?
Complexity Scientist; Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital; Author, Overcomplicated
How do we best build a civilization that is galvanized by long-term thinking?
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin; Director, Cognition, Culture, and Development Lab
Will human psychology keep pace with the exponential growth of technological innovation associated with cultural evolution?
Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, Curator of Primate Behavioral Biology at Harvard University; Author, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
In which century or millennium can all humanity be expected to speak the same primary language?
Psychologist, UPenn; Director, Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP); Author, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite
How will predictive models in the social sciences achieve the accuracy and precision of those in the natural sciences?
Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain
How diverse is life in the universe?
Will blockchain return us to the golden age of ownership of information licenses that can be resold like books and records?
Journalist; Author, How Do You Fight a Horse-Sized Duck?: Secrets to Succeeding at Interview Mind Games and Getting the Job You Want; Nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize
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 Lamp, 1+2+3+4… = -1/12; etc.)?
Cognitive Scientist, French National Center for Scientific Research; Author, Not Born Yesterday
Can major historical events, from the advent of moral religions to the industrial revolution, be explained by changes in life history strategies?
Professor and Chair, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University; Fellow, AAAS
How many incommensurable ideas can we hold in our mind simultaneously?
Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; Author, Mirroring People
How does a thought become a feeling?
Futurist; Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning, Salesforce.com; Author, Inevitable Surprises
Is the universe relatively simple and comprehensible by the human brain, or is it so complex, higher dimensional and multiversal that it remains forever elusive to humans?
Can we create new senses for humans—not just touch, taste, vision, hearing, smell, but totally novel qualia for which we don't yet have words?
Theoretical Physicist; Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, ASU; Author, The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far
Is the universe like an onion that will require science to keep peeling back new layers of reality and asking questions forever?
Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University
What new methodology will be required to explain the neural basis of consciousness?
Owner, Greg Lynn FORM office; Ordentlicher University Professor of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna; Studio Professor, UCLA School of Arts and Architecture
Can we train machines to design and construct a humane and vibrant built environment for us?
Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University; Author, Why Religion?
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century?
Are accurate mathematical theories of individual human behavior possible?
Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love
What will courtship, mate selection, length of marriages, and family composition and networks be like when we are all living over 150 years?
Why are reason, science, and evidence so impotent against superstition, religion, and dogma?
Will weaving networks that blend humans and machines yield network effects?
Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci
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)?
Can we ever wean humans off their addiction to religion?
John A. Wilson Professor and HHMI Professor, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin
What would comprise the most precise and complete sonic representation of the history of life?
Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, The Empathy Diaries
What will time with artifacts that simulate the emotional experience of being with another person do to our human capacity to handle the surely rougher, more frictional, and demanding human intimacies on offer?
Professor Emerita of Psychology, Stanford University; Professor of Psychology and Education, Columbia Teachers College; Author, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought
How do the limits of the mind limit our understanding?
Is there a fundamental difference between the biological world and the physical world?
Professor Emeritus, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago; Author, Why Evolution is True; Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.
If science does in fact confirm that we lack free will, what are the implications for our notions of blame, punishment, reward, and moral responsibility?
Planetary Scientist; Cassini Imaging Team Leader; Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado
What will it take for us to be fully confident that we have found life elsewhere in the cosmos?
Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred
What is consciousness?
Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust
Why is the world so beautiful?
Professor of Philosophy; Director, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen; Author, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame
What is the world without the mind?
Do the laws of physics change with the passage of time?
Warren J. and Viola M. Raymer Chair in Computer Sciences and Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin
What quirk of evolution caused us to develop the ability to do pure mathematics?
Will humans ever prove the Riemann Hypothesis in mathematics?
Director, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Vienna; Genetics Professor, University of Vienna
Can we engineer a human being?
Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Reading University, UK; Fellow, Royal Society; Author, Wired for Culture
Is a single world language and culture inevitable?
Does religious engagement promote or impede morality, altruism, and human flourishing?
Director, Women's Brain Initiative; Associate Director, Alzhiemer's Prevention Clinic, Weill Cornell Medical College; Author, The XX Brain
Is there an evolutionary advantage to building societies that favor entertaining over understanding?
Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Adjunct Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study; Author, The Ego Tunnel
What is the most intelligent and efficient way to minimize the overall amount of conscious suffering in the universe?
Will we be one of the last generations in human history that dies?
Nobel Prize in Physics; Senior Astrophysicist, Observational Cosmology Laboratory, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Coauthor (with John Boslough), The Very First Light
What is the master principle governing the growth and evolution of complex systems?
Evolutionary dynamics scholar; Program in Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University; Visitor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
How much of what we call "reality" is ultimately grounded and instantiated in convincing communication and storytelling?
What might the last fully biological human's statement be at their last supper?
Theoretical Particle Physicist and Cosmologist; Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan; Author, Supersymmetry and Beyond
Are the laws of physics unique and inevitable?
What will it take to end war once and for all?
Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol; Author, The Self-Illusion, Founder of Speakezee
What would the mind of a child raised in total isolation of other animals be like?
When will we replace governments with algorithms?
Is the actual all that is possible?
Social Psychologist; Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind
Why is it so hard to find the truth?
Theoretical Physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Is there a single theory of all physics (TOP), and what is it?
Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University
What behaviors are we attributing only to brain mechanisms that may be better explained by considering biomechanics?
Is there a place for our past in our future?
Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began
Will humans ever embrace their own diversity?
Will civilization collapse before I die?
Does this question exist in a parallel universe?
Research Specialist, MIT Media Lab; Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center; Author, The New Breed
What future progressive norms would most forward-thinking people today dismiss as too transgressive?
Why do we experience feelings of meaning in a universe without purpose?
Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind
Will we soon cease to care whether we are experiencing normal, augmented, or virtual reality?
Senior Investigator, Geisinger Health System; Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Toulouse, France; Co-author, The Invisible Gorilla
How complex must be the initial design of the simplest machine that can learn from experience to achieve, at a minimum, the intelligence and abilities of a typical human being?
Professor, Oxford University; Director, Future of Humanity Institute; Author, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
Which questions should we not ask and not try to answer?
Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction
What kinds of minds could solve the mind-body problem?
Department Chair; Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Co-author (with Anthony Greenwald), Blind Spot
Will the appearance of new species of talented computational intelligence result in improving the moral behavior of persons and societies?
Is civilization's demand for water a dividing or unifying force?
Was agriculture a wrong turn for civilization?
What knowledge and know-how are our descendants at risk of forgetting as our species passes through future evolutionary bottlenecks?
When will "human being" cease to be a meaningful category to speak of?
David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin; Author, Quantum Computing Since Democritus
Can we program a computer to find a 10,000-bit string that encodes more actionable wisdom than any human has ever expressed?
Can general-purpose computers be constructed out of pure gravity?
What will be obvious to us in a generation that we have an inkling of today?
Are there any phenomena for which it will never be possible to develop parsimonious theories?
Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
Can rational beings such as Bayesian robots, humans, super-intelligent AIs ever reach agreement?
Fellow and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School; Author, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
Can an increasingly powerful species survive (and overcome) the actions of its most extreme individuals?
Distinguished Professor of Physiology, Pharmacology, and Neurology, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center
Will there ever be a mechanistic scientific question that can be asked about the lone individuality of mental life, with its particular beginning, middle, and end?
Is the brain a computer or an antenna?
Journalist; Founding Editor of The Guardian's literary supplement, the Guardian Review; Author, Hame
Is love really all you need?
Will it ever be possible to download the information stored in the human brain?
Will the "hard problem" of consciousness dissolve (rather than be solved) as we learn more about the natural world?
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?
Psychologist; Co-founder, The Gottman Relationship Institute; Author, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Will a comprehensive mathematics of human behavior ever be created?
Curators’ Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia
Is there a single, evolved biological mechanism that can be tweaked to improve overall health, cognitive abilities, and slow aging?
Professor of Psychiatry, Translational Neuroscience Division, Duke University Health System
How will we know if we achieve universal happiness?
Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy
Why are we so often kind to strangers when nobody is watching and we have nothing to gain?
Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University; Author, Advice and Dissent
Will AI make the Luddites (mostly) right?
A leading scientist of the 21st century for Genomic Sciences; Co-Founder, Chairman, Synthetic Genomics, Inc.; Founder, J. Craig Venter Institute; Author, A Life Decoded
Will the creation of a super-human class from a combination of genome editing and direct biological-machine interfaces lead to the collapse of civilization?
Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Materials Department, University of Oxford; Author, The Science of Can and Can't
Is the number of interesting questions finite or not?
Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College; Author, From Here to Infinity
Will post-humans be organic or electronic?
Professor of Psychology, Director, Comparative Cognition Laboratory and the Canine Cognition Center, Yale University
What cognitive capacities make humans so damn weird relative to all the other animals on the planet?
Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics, Stanford; Author, The Theoretical Minimum series
Is there a design to the laws of physics, or are they the result of chance and the laws of large numbers?
Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth
Would you like to live 1,000 years?
Are we smart enough to know when we’ve reached the limits of our ability to understand the universe?
What will be the use of 99% of humanity for the 1%?
Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir
What does the conscious mind do that is impossible for the unconscious mind?
Is intersubjectivity possible in a quantum mechanical universe?
Father of Behavioral Economics; Recipient, 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science; Director, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; Author, Misbehaving
How will we cope when we are capable of keeping humans alive longer than our optimal life expectancy?
Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU; Director Emotional Brain Institute; Author, Anxious
Has consciousness done more good or bad for humanity?
Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond
Can a single underlying process explain the emergence of structure at the physical, biological, cognitive, and machine levels?
Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind
Will the "third culture" be followed by a fourth culture, a fifth culture, and, ominously, a Final Culture?
Professor, Harvard University; Director, Personal Genome Project; Co-author (with Ed Regis), Regenesis
What will we do as an encore once we manage to develop technological solutions to infection, aging, poverty, asteroids, and heat death of the universe?
Professor, Philosophy & Neural Science; Co-Director, Center for Mind, Brain, & Consciousness, NYU; Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Australian National U.; Author, Reality+
How can we design a machine that can correctly answer every question, including this one?
Editor-in-Chief of Nature since 1995; Beginning summer 2018, he will become Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature’s portfolio of journals, books and magazines
How do I describe the achievements, meanings, and power of Beethoven's piano sonata “Appassionata”?
How far can we extend beyond our human limitations to more fully grasp the nature of the world?
Is there a Turing test for living rather than thinking that can distinguish animate from automata?
Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves
So, before The Singularity...?
Theoretical Physicist, Stanford; Father of Eternal Chaotic Inflation; Inaugural Recipient, Fundamental Physics Prize
Where were the laws of physics written before the universe was born?
Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back
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?
Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns
Is it ultimately possible for life to bend the shape of the universe to fit life's purposes, as we are now bending the shape of our environment here on earth?
If we want to make a real and effective science-based policy, should we change politics or science?
Theoretical Physcicist; Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute; Author, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
How and when will it end or will it persist indefinitely?
Physicist, University of Oxford; Author, The Beginning of Infinity; Recipient, Edge Computation Science Prize
Are the ways qualia relate to computation, creativity to free will, risk to probability, morality to epistemology, all the same question?
Sara Miller McCune Director, Center For Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, professor, Stanford University; Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies, University of Washington
Are humans capable of building a moral economy?
Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone
What is the principle that causes complex adaptive systems (life, organisms, minds, societies) to spontaneously emerge from the interaction of simpler elements (chemicals, cells, neurons, individual humans)?
How can the process of science be improved?
Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness
Is there an ultimate reality?
Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline
Can wild animals that are large and dangerous be made averse to threatening humans?
Why are there no trees in the ocean?
Director, Big History Institute and Distinguished Professor in History, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, Origin Story
Will we pass our audition as planetary managers?
Novelist; Recipient, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction; Author, Sweet Tooth; Solar; On Chesil Beach; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; The Cockroach
If the sum of all significant knowledge is finite, what proportion of it can humans, aided by intelligent machines, eventually attain?
Philosopher, Novelist; Recipient, 2014 National Humanities Medal; Author, Plato at the Googleplex; 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
If we're not the agents of ourselves (and it's hard to see how we can be), how can we make sense of moral accountability (and how can we live coherently without it)?
Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Barnard College of Columbia University; Author, Black Hole Survival Guide; Director of Sciences, Pioneer Works
Is gravity a fundamental law of nature, or does gravity—and thereby spacetime—emerge as a consequence of the underlying quantum nature of reality?
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?
Why?
Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist
Have we left the Age of Reason, never to return?
Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality
How can we empower the better angels of our nature?
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?
Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now; Co-author (with Rem Koolhas), Project Japan: Metabolism Talks
Does the future belong to non-human entities?
