Jeff Bezos:

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy--they're given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans plodding as we are--will astonish ourselves. We'Il invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble small machines that can enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but inevitable news* that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but engineer it to specifications.

I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

Jeff Bezos:

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy--they're given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans plodding as we are--will astonish ourselves. We'Il invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble small machines that can enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but inevitable news* that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but engineer it to specifications.

I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?