Jamais Cascio
With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.Collection: Environmental
Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers - all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.Collection: Environmental
Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.Collection: Design
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.Collection: Knowledge
Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.Collection: Intelligence
Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.Collection: Intelligence
Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Community
Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.Collection: Goal
By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.Collection: Today
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.Collection: Urbanization
The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittleCollection: Future
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.Collection: Winning
The biggest potential and actual crises of the 21st century all have a strong, long, slow aspect with a significant lag between cause and effect. We have to train ourselves to be thinking in terms of longer-term results.Collection: Strong
Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.Collection: Stress
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.Collection: Fiction Stories
Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.Collection: Wall
In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Would Be
Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.Collection: Tunnels
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.Collection: Work
Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century - in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.Collection: Keys
Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.Collection: Needs
It's remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.Collection: Information
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.Collection: Technology
The reality is that de-carbonisation is not happening fast enough.Collection: Reality
Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Gathering
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.Collection: Running
As our various electronic devices gain more and more sensory awareness, we open up the potential for entirely new forms of interaction. Not just new interfaces - tapping and shaking and whatnot - but a shift in presence.Collection: Gains
As useful as websites and journals are, there's real value in books, too.Collection: Real
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Greed
The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it's 'plausibly surreal' - it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.Collection: Book
Futures thinking is hard work. Fortunately, you do get better at it with practice. It's worth the effort.Collection: Hard Work
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.Collection: Focus And Concentration
My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic.Collection: Mind
I have to admit it: I'm not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.Collection: Clouds
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?Collection: Mean
Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.Collection: Cat
Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.Collection: Faces
Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?'Collection: Example
Nature stopped being natural decades ago.Collection: Natural
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.Collection: Cutting
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Atmosphere