Jamais Cascio Quotes

“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

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

— 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

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

“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

“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.”

— 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.

— Jamais Cascio

“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

By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.

— Jamais Cascio

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

— 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

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

— 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

“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.”

— Jamais Cascio

“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

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

— 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

“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.”

— 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

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

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

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

— 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

“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.”

— Jamais Cascio

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

“In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.”

— Jamais Cascio

“Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.”

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

“Thinking about the future is fundamentally important to dealing with the challenges of today.”

— Jamais Cascio

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Jamais Cascio

“Nature stopped being natural decades ago.”

— Jamais Cascio

“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

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

— Jamais Cascio

“Technologists and futurists call the mashup of digital info and physical space 'blended reality.'”

— Jamais Cascio

“The Internet is not kind to established institutions.”

— Jamais Cascio

“There's no doubt: The iPad is a beautiful, extremely well-designed device.”

— Jamais Cascio

“You need to recognize that the copyright date on a book reflects when it came out, not when it was written - assume that the information in the book is at least a year older than the copyright date, and possibly two.”

— 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

“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.”

— Jamais Cascio

“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.”

— Jamais Cascio

“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

“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.”

— Jamais Cascio

“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.”

— Jamais Cascio

“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 brittle”

— Jamais Cascio