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.

The curse of cyberspace is that everything we want to preserve will get lost and everything we want to lose will be preserved.

It will take a decade or two, but fundamentalism is going to burn itself.

The difference between our collective generation and your generation (differentiating the reporters from the students) is that we poured our souls out on paper that got easily yellowed and lost. The danger is that many of your friends (nodding at the students) are putting intimate ideas in cyberspace journals. So when today's 15-year-old is 40, some friend is going to drag out all of that idiotic stuff at their class reunion.

The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present

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.

Using technology merely to lower operational costs amounts to standing on a whale fishing for minnows. It just allows you to do the old thing more efficiently, where in this moment of deep transformation, it is much more likely that you should be doing something entirely new in an entirely different way.