Jamais Cascio Quotes

Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real.

Nobody's going to fix the world for us, but working together, making use of technological innovations and human communities alike, we might just be able to fix it ourselves.

Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.

Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.

By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.

Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.

Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.

To be clear, geoengineering won't solve global warming. It's not a 'techno-fix.' It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences.

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.

Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.

Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century - in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.

Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.

I have to admit it: I'm not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.

Most of us who work as professional futurists never really stop gathering information - you never know when a provocative, potentially disruptive new development might appear.

As useful as websites and journals are, there's real value in books, too.

Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

Futures thinking is hard work. Fortunately, you do get better at it with practice. It's worth the effort.

Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?'

Many futurists use a checklist approach to make sure they're covering a sufficiently wide set of topics in terms of both research and brainstorming during a foresight exercise.

Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.

My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic.

It's a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.

Many of the cognitive enhancement drugs serve to increase focus and concentration. But 'letting your mind wander' is very often an important part of the creative process.

The reality is that de-carbonisation is not happening fast enough.

Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won't really take off until it offers broad freedom of use.

In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.

It's remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.

Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.

The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.