Jamais Cascio Quotes
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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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Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.
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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.
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It's remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.
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My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic.
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The biggest potential and actual crises of the 21st century all have a strong, long, slow aspect with a significant lag between cause and effect. We have to train ourselves to be thinking in terms of longer-term results.
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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.
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Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century - in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.
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Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.
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There's no doubt: The iPad is a beautiful, extremely well-designed device.
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Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.
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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.
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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.
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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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In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.
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Geoengineering involves humans making intentional, large-scale modifications to the Earths geophysical systems in order to change the environment.
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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.
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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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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.