Zitat des Tages von Jamais Cascio:
I have to admit it: I'm not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.
Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.
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?
Thinking about the future is fundamentally important to dealing with the challenges of today.
Human beings are social animals; we devote a significant portion of our brain just to dealing with interactions with other humans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.
Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.
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.
Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century - in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.
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.
Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.
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.
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.
Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.
Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.
There's no doubt: The iPad is a beautiful, extremely well-designed device.
Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
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.
