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.

People were touchingly naive at the dawn of the Internet revolution when they said the Internet will route around censorship the way it routes around damage. With any revolution, the establishment catches up and figures out how to screw it up. The answer is to keep technology advancing fast enough so that those who would try to control it can't. It's up to people to defend what they care about. We shouldn't be complacent that this stuff is going to be a force for good.

There is reason to be scared. Look at what has happened with fundamentalism - this is a reaction against modernity. It happens to be cloaked in religion, but these are people saying enough is enough. It's happened again and again through history. The good news is that modernism has always won.

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

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.

This new world of personal media - the Web, the Internet and et cetera - not only delivers the world to your living rooms, but everywhere. And we get to answer back. And we're expected to answer back.

I think companies over the last 10 years have done a very bad job of explaining to their employees what the intrinsic risks are. All I know is, if you wait until you let the employee go to deal with the issue of how do you communicate to the employee about being let go, it's too late to do anything.