Everything is danger, but we pretend that it's not.

I think there are two aspects to smart environments. One is information embedded in places and things. The other is location awareness, so that devices we carry around know where we are. When you combine those two, you get a lot of possibilities.

Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on technology. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words  -  and this is the problem that they have with Americans  -  just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well.

You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.

One thing we didn't know in 1996 is that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a culture with online advertising.

We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.