Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.
Nature stopped being natural decades ago.
The Internet is not kind to established institutions.
In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.
The reality is that de-carbonisation is not happening fast enough.
I have to admit it: I'm not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.
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.
Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?'
Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.
Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.
Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.
Thinking about the future is fundamentally important to dealing with the challenges of today.
Simply put, the Internet undermines the ability of an institution to control its own narrative.
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.
Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
It's remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.
Futures thinking is hard work. Fortunately, you do get better at it with practice. It's worth the effort.
Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.
In entertainment, zombies are so played out. I have a gut sense that people are getting tired of apocalyptic scenarios.
Human beings are social animals; we devote a significant portion of our brain just to dealing with interactions with other humans.
My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic.
Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.
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.
Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century - in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.
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.
Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.
Neodymium is one of 17 'rare-earth metals,' and these elements have turned out to be critical to the rapidly-growing green technology industries.
Geoengineering involves humans making intentional, large-scale modifications to the Earths geophysical systems in order to change the environment.
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.
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.
Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.
Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.
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.
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.
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.
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.