Stock prices turn people's heads. When prices are high, we treat a company like gods, and if they drop, we treat them as fools.

We invent our technologies and then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves as individuals, communities and cultures.

I would say digital technology probably doesn't have much impact on us so far. We've seen photographs of people from when they are alive. We see home movies. We have videotapes now and e-mails. When it's going to get interesting is in massively multiplayer online games where you have avatars (online personas). You could actually create an avatar that's semi-autonomous. It could do things for you while you get off the game to run the rest of your life.

Sometimes I think we're on this world for three reasons: to be useful, to tell each other stories and to collect stuff. It's the only explanation for eBay. We love to collect stuff, and at least if we're collecting stuff in cyberspace we're not deforesting the Sierra Nevada.

If you look at the last 150 years, about every 30 years or so, a new scientific discipline emerges that starts spinning out technologies and capturing people's imaginations. Go back to 1900: That industry was chemistry. People had chemistry sets. In the 1930s, it was the rise of physics and physicists. They build on each other. Chemists laid the experimental understanding for the physicists to build their theories. It was three physicists who invented the transistor in 1947. That started the information revolution. Today, kids get computers.

I'm actually an optimist about what lies ahead. Are wikis reliable? It depends on the specific business. Is Wikipedia reliable? You bet. Wikipedia is a researcher's dream.

Microsoft is a big intellectual roach motel. All the big minds go in, and they don't come out.