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.

Jamais Cascio

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

Jamais Cascio

Us Unexpected UN

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.

Jamais Cascio

Time Space Knowledge

Human beings are social animals; we devote a significant portion of our brain just to dealing with interactions with other humans.

Jamais Cascio

Wit Vote Us

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.

Jamais Cascio

Men Art Your

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.

Jamais Cascio

War Business Whole

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

Jamais Cascio

Work Future You

Neodymium is one of 17 'rare-earth metals,' and these elements have turned out to be critical to the rapidly-growing green technology industries.

Jamais Cascio

Technology Men Art

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.

Jamais Cascio

Science Men Age

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.

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Work Men You

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

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Tin T Putin

We've already seen digital picture frames pre-loaded with viruses; I'm not eager to have my refrigerator hacked or my alarm clock turned against me.

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Age Wit Virus

Fragile economies and weak infrastructures tend to worsen the results of climate disruptions, a problem exemplified by Bangladesh's vulnerability to monsoons, accelerating desertification in northern China, and, most visibly, Hurricane Katrina's devastation in New Orleans.

Jamais Cascio

Worse Weak Vulnerability

I don't think that a Singularity would be visible to those going through one. Even the most disruptive changes are not universally or immediately distributed, and late followers learn from the reactions and dilemmas of those who had initially encountered the disruptive change.

Jamais Cascio

Change Would Who

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

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War Were Warming

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.

Jamais Cascio

Men Art Well

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.

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History Change Writers

The Internet is not kind to established institutions.

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T Shed She

By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.

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Undermine UN Tomorrow

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.

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Technology History Freedom

Human civilization has been changing the Earth's 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.

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Men Art Wind

I understand that most iPhone users want a phone that can do other nifty things, not a general purpose computer that happens to make phone calls. Strict control over apps minimizes the chances that someone will find their phone hacked or virus-laden.

Jamais Cascio

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?

Jamais Cascio

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

Jamais Cascio

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

Jamais Cascio

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.

Jamais Cascio

The cloud computing model may be a wonderful system when it works, but it's a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare.

Jamais Cascio

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.

Jamais Cascio

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

Jamais Cascio

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

Jamais Cascio

I do think that fashion may end up being the 'killer app' for wearable augmented reality systems. This is in part because it's not simply task-oriented - like finding a restaurant or where your friend is currently lounging about - but experience-oriented. It becomes part of your life.

Jamais Cascio

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.

Jamais Cascio

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

Jamais Cascio

Much as Cold War nuclear strategists could argue about winning a nuclear war by having more survivors, advocates of a Global Warming War might see the United States, Western Europe, or Russia as better able to ride out climate disruption and manipulation than, say, China or the countries of the Middle East.

Jamais Cascio

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.

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Geoengineering involves humans making intentional, large-scale modifications to the Earths geophysical systems in order to change the environment.

Jamais Cascio

Simply put, the Internet undermines the ability of an institution to control its own narrative.

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.

Jamais Cascio

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.

Jamais Cascio

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

Jamais Cascio

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.

Jamais Cascio

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

Jamais Cascio

In entertainment, zombies are so played out. I have a gut sense that people are getting tired of apocalyptic scenarios.

Jamais Cascio

Entrepreneurs need to recognize that, especially in the digital domain, they are unlikely to come up with something that is going to be permanently on top, that impermanence and ephemerality is the nature of the beast.

Jamais Cascio

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.

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

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

Jamais Cascio

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.

Jamais Cascio

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

Jamais Cascio

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

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.

Jamais Cascio