Explore Quotes by Jamais Cascio

In the U.S., we are free to speak our minds and to spend money without being forced to reveal our identities - except when using the Web. Browsing the Web leaves digital tracks everywhere in the form of log files, and anyone who hosts a Web site can be easily traced.

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.

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

Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal - it tells us we need to live within our means, whether economic, ecological, or political - but it's insufficient for uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means can change, swiftly and unexpectedly, beneath us?

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

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.

Back in the 1500s, the culture that we had built in the West embraced multigenerational projects quite easily. Notre Dame. Massive cathedrals were not built over the course of a few years, they were built over a few generations. People who started building them knew they wouldn't be finished until their grandson was born.

Trying to do what your competitors are doing but basically a little bit better is probably not going to be the winning strategy. The problem is finding what your competitors wouldn't even consider doing.

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.

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

Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services.

The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined to become the most important tool for cultural change in human history.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

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.

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.

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

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

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

But here's the ugly truth: nature doesn't care about democracy, or who's right, or what's fair. And because of the slow-change aspect of climate, we can't wait until the worst effects are upon us to make a decision -- by then, it would be far, far too late. The scenario we may be faced with is one where doing something for the wrong reasons, run by the wrong people, may still save more lives than holding out for a more appealing option.

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

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