Jamais Cascio Quotes
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Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real.
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Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
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Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.
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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?
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Futures thinking is hard work. Fortunately, you do get better at it with practice. It's worth the effort.
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Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.
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Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.
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By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.
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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.
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Nature stopped being natural decades ago.
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The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers.
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Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.
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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.
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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.
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A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.
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Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.
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As useful as websites and journals are, there's real value in books, too.
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Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
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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.
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Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment.
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In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.
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Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.
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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.
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Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.
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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.
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I have to admit it: I'm not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.
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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 wouldnt even consider doing.
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Human civilization has been changing the Earths 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.
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Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.
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The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle
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