Happy New Year, now get back to work

Proof that I am an official Boing Boing link-ho: What is your dangerous idea? Edge magazine asked many of the world's scientific minds what their dangerous idea was. I clicked over to Clay Shirky's comment about free will disappearing, but found that other people's quotes were more engrossing. Haim Harari, for example, wrote the following:

Democracy may be on its way out. Future historians may determine that Democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).

Also entertaining was Alison Gopnik, who got downright recursive about the question:

It may not be good to encourage scientists to articulate dangerous ideas.