Words matter. These are the best Jamais Cascio Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As useful as websites and journals are, there’s real value in books, too.
There’s no doubt: The iPad is a beautiful, extremely well-designed device.
Future forecasting is all about testing strategies – it’s like a wind tunnel.
Technologists and futurists call the mashup of digital info and physical space ‘blended reality.’
Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we’d still face decades of warming.
The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it’s ‘plausibly surreal’ – it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.
Most of us who work as professional futurists never really stop gathering information – you never know when a provocative, potentially disruptive new development might appear.
Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.
I understand that most iPhone users want a phone that can do other nifty things, not a general purpose computer that happens to make phone calls. Strict control over apps minimizes the chances that someone will find their phone hacked or virus-laden.
We’ve already seen digital picture frames pre-loaded with viruses; I’m not eager to have my refrigerator hacked or my alarm clock turned against me.
Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.
Nobody’s going to fix the world for us, but working together, making use of technological innovations and human communities alike, we might just be able to fix it ourselves.
It’s a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.
Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.
Trying to do what your competitors are doing but basically a little bit better is probably not going to be the winning strategy. The problem is finding what your competitors wouldn’t even consider doing.
To be clear, geoengineering won’t solve global warming. It’s not a ‘techno-fix.’ It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences.
Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century – in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.
I don’t think that a Singularity would be visible to those going through one. Even the most disruptive changes are not universally or immediately distributed, and late followers learn from the reactions and dilemmas of those who had initially encountered the disruptive change.
Is there a better example of natural selection in action than ‘Project Runway?’
Geoengineering involves humans making intentional, large-scale modifications to the Earths geophysical systems in order to change the environment.
I have to admit it: I’m not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.
Don’t expect to be able to upload your cat’s brain into your Roomba any time soon.
In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.
Fluid intelligence doesn’t look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
As our various electronic devices gain more and more sensory awareness, we open up the potential for entirely new forms of interaction. Not just new interfaces – tapping and shaking and whatnot – but a shift in presence.
Nature stopped being natural decades ago.
I do think that fashion may end up being the ‘killer app’ for wearable augmented reality systems. This is in part because it’s not simply task-oriented – like finding a restaurant or where your friend is currently lounging about – but experience-oriented. It becomes part of your life.
Many futurists use a checklist approach to make sure they’re covering a sufficiently wide set of topics in terms of both research and brainstorming during a foresight exercise.
Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services.
Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.
When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.
With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.
Much as Cold War nuclear strategists could argue about winning a nuclear war by having more survivors, advocates of a Global Warming War might see the United States, Western Europe, or Russia as better able to ride out climate disruption and manipulation than, say, China or the countries of the Middle East.
Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers – all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.
You need to recognize that the copyright date on a book reflects when it came out, not when it was written – assume that the information in the book is at least a year older than the copyright date, and possibly two.
Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won’t really take off until it offers broad freedom of use.
It’s remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.
Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal – it tells us we need to live within our means, whether economic, ecological, or political – but it’s insufficient for uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means can change, swiftly and unexpectedly, beneath us?
Carbon dioxide isn’t the only greenhouse gas out there. Other substances, such as water vapor and nitrous oxide, also trap heat to varying degrees.
Many of the cognitive enhancement drugs serve to increase focus and concentration. But ‘letting your mind wander’ is very often an important part of the creative process.
In entertainment, zombies are so played out. I have a gut sense that people are getting tired of apocalyptic scenarios.
The Internet is not kind to established institutions.
Human civilization has been changing the Earth’s environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.
The cloud computing model may be a wonderful system when it works, but it’s a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare.
