Jamais Cascio Quotes

Futures thinking is hard work. Fortunately, you do get better at it with practice. It's worth the effort.

By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.

Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.

Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.

Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.

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.

In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.

Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.

I have to admit it: I'm not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.

Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.

Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?'

My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

It's remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.

Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

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.

Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services.

The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle

Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment.

As useful as websites and journals are, there's real value in books, too.

Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.

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.

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

But here's the ugly truth: nature doesn't care about democracy, or who's right, or what's fair. And because of the slow-change aspect of climate, we can't wait until the worst effects are upon us to make a decision -- by then, it would be far, far too late. The scenario we may be faced with is one where doing something for the wrong reasons, run by the wrong people, may still save more lives than holding out for a more appealing option.

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.

Human civilization has been changing the Earths 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.

Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.

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.

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.