Jamais Cascio

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic.

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?

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.

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.

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.