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1 " Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich... "
― Robert Harris , The Fear Index
2 " This was the problem with drinks parties: getting stuck with a person you didn't want to talk to while someone you did was tantalisingly in view. "
3 " In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Whoever woke at four in the morning because they were feeling happy? "
4 " Really, take it from me: it is always the unknown that is most frightening. "
5 " The Greek philosopher Epictetus recognised this two thousand years ago when he wrote: ‘What disturbs and alarms man are not the things but his opinions and fancies about the things. "
6 " Pretty soon all the information in the world – every tiny scrap of knowledge that humans possess, every little thought we’ve ever had that’s been considered worth preserving over thousands of years – all of it will be available digitally. Every road on earth has been mapped. Every building photographed. Everywhere we humans go, whatever we buy, whatever websites we look at, we leave a digital trail as clear as slug-slime. And this data can be read, searched and analysed by computers and value extracted from it in ways we cannot even begin to conceive. "
7 " But really, why would one bother to imitate anything so vulnerable and unreliable, or with such built-in obsolescence: a central processing unit that could be utterly destroyed because some ancillary mechanical part – the heart, say, or the liver – suffered a temporary interruption? It was like losing a Cray supercomputer and all of its memory files because a plug needed changing. "
8 " the struggle [for existence] almost invariably will be most severe between the individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers. CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species (1859) "
9 " I guess you’re familiar with Moore’s Law? This states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit—which basically means memory size and processing speed—will double every eighteen months, and costs will halve. Moore’s Law has held with amazing consistency since 1965, and it still holds. "
10 " THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL HAVE NO PAPERTHE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL CARRY NO INVENTORYTHE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL BE ENTIRELY DIGITALTHE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED "
