Forget artificial intelligence - in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.

For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means.

Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning.

Mass literacy is a phenomenon of the past few centuries, and one that has reached the majority of the world's adult population only within the past 75 years.

The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.

When ATM machines came out and people were prosecuted for robbing ATM machines, I don't think anybody thought the banks were against technology because they didn't want their ATM machines lifted.

A lot was happening in A.I. But I also realized it wasn't clear what Salesforce's role in A.I. was. That's when we started acquiring quite a few artificial intelligence companies, maybe a dozen.

The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.