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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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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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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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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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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Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.
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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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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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Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.
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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.
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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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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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Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.
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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.
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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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Futures thinking is hard work. Fortunately, you do get better at it with practice. It's worth the effort.
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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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Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
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There's no doubt: The iPad is a beautiful, extremely well-designed device.
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As useful as websites and journals are, there's real value in books, too.
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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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Nature stopped being natural decades ago.