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.

As Stewart Brand (co-founder of Emeryville's Global Business Network) likes to say, "Information lasts forever. Digital information lasts forever or for five years, whichever comes first." There are examples everywhere. The tapes from the original Viking landers that went to Mars are at (NASA's) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but there is no machine that can read the tapes.

I've actually tried not to call myself a futurist for the last 25 years. I prefer "forecaster," but people call me a futurist, and it doesn't really bother me.

My driving style is alert. As a forecaster, I can't help but think about who else is on the road and how little attention they are paying to their driving.

Any thinking person is qualified to be a forecaster, and in fact, everybody does it every day.

I don't think information overload is a function of the volume of information. It's a derivative of the volume of information plus the sense-making tools you have.

More information and more communications foster world peace and understanding. But connecting extremist nut cases together on the Web - whatever flavor extremism they are - is a really bad thing. More information may not be a good thing, either.