There is sort of a continuing problem of putting a moral template on the future that is based on the morality of today.

The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.

Journalists don't have audiences, they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.

There are actual communication systems being built to enable eye surgeons to get inside the eye, and vascular surgeons to get inside the arteries. You could see a social reaction in which people would want to regulate this technology because they are threatened by it, and thereby cause a lot of harm. There are several scenarios that are happening at once. The other scenario is that the Japanese are going for this in a big way.

I'm somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

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.