Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.

Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

Doing real world projects is, I think, the best way to learn and also to engage the world and find out what the world is all about.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense.

Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.

By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.