Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.
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 wouldnt even consider doing.
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.
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.
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.
In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.
Human civilization has been changing the Earths environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.
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.
Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.
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.
The reality is that de-carbonisation is not happening fast enough.
As useful as websites and journals are, there’s real value in books, too.
Future forecasting is all about testing strategies – it’s like a wind tunnel.
Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we’d still face decades of warming.
Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.
Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.
Don’t expect to be able to upload your cat’s brain into your Roomba any time soon.