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These were selected from the 4,200
statements included in the Early '90s Predictions
Database. For more details regarding the original
publication of these quotes, use the '90s
Database Search - see link at left.
Everything from telegraphy and
photography in the 19th century to the silicon
chip in the 20th has amplified the din of information,
until matters have reached such proportions today that
for the average person, information no longer has any
relation to the solution of problems ... Our defenses
against information glut have broken down; our
information immune system is inoperable. We don't
know how to filter it out; we don't know how to
reduce it; we don't know to use it. – Neil
Postman, 1990~~~For blind bards as for
nearsighted whiz kids, cyberspace will feel
like Paradise! Of
course don’t expect to keep your old identity: one
name, one country, one clock. For be it through medical
reconstruction or through fantasy, multiplied versions of
yourself are going to blossom up everywhere. Ideal,
statistical, ironical. A springtime for schizophrenia!
– Nicole Stenger, 1992~~~Who's going to control
all this technology? The
corporations, of
course. And will that mean your brain implant is going to
come complete with a corporate logo, and 20 percent of
the time you're going to be hearing commercials?
– R.U. Sirius (real name, Ken Goffman),
1992~~~Combine GPS with a simple
transmitter and computer ... If you want to track migratory birds,
prisoners on parole or – what amounts to much the
same thing – a teenage daughter in possession of
your car keys, you are going to be a customer sooner or
later. – Peter Huber, 1992~~~If cyberspace is utopian it
is because it opens
the possibility of using the deterministic platform for
unpredictable ends ... We might even grow a system large
and complex and unstable enough to leap across that last
possible bifurcation - autopoetically - into that
strangest of all possible attractors, the godmind.
– David Porush, 1992~~~The whole massive, lethal
superpower infrastructure comes
unfolding out of
21st-century cyberspace like some impossible fluid
origami trick. The Reserve guys from the bowling leagues
suddenly reveal themselves to be digitally assisted Top
Gun veterans from a hundred weekend cyberspace campaigns.
And they go to some godforsaken place that doesn't
possess Virtual Reality As A Strategic Asset, and they
bracket that army in their rangefinder screens, and then
they cut it off, and then they kill it. Blood and burning
flesh splashes the far side of the glass. But it
can't get through the screen. – Bruce Sterling, 1993~~~As the electronic revolution
merges with the biological evolution, we will have - if we don't have it
already - artificial intelligence, and artificial life,
and will be struggling even more than now with issues
such as the legal rights of robots, and whether you
should allow your son to marry one, and who has custody
of the offspring of such a union. – Jim Dator,
1993~~~For 300 years we have had a
scientific ethos that says "information is
good" - and the
more we know the better. I believe we're heading into
an era when there's going to be enormous pressure to
block out, to prevent further development of certain
kinds of knowledge. – Alvin Toffler,
1993~~~If you change the way you
make wealth, you
inevitably change the way you make war. And if you change
the way you make war, you ought to be thinking about
changing the way you make peace ... If we are now in the
process of transforming the way we create wealth, from
the industrial to the informational … the more
knowledge-intensive military action becomes, the more
nonlinear it becomes; the more a small input someplace
can neutralize an enormous investment. And having the
right bit or byte of information at the right place at
the right time, in India or in Turkistan or in God knows
where, could neutralize an enormous amount of military
power somewhere else … Think in terms of families.
Think in terms of narco-traffickers. And think in terms
of the very, very smart hacker sitting in Tehran. –
Alvin Toffler, 1993~~~We're going to have to
look at information as though we'd never seen the
stuff before ... The
economy of the future will be based on relationship
rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than
sequential. And finally, in the years to come, most human
exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting
not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our
future business will be conducted in a world made more of
verbs than nouns. – John Perry Barlow, 1994~~~The body net will be
connected to the building net, the building net to the community net,
and the community net to the global net. From gesture
sensors worn on our bodies to the worldwide
infrastructure of communications satellites and
long-distance fiber, the elements of the bitsphere will
finally come together to form one densely interwoven
system within which the knee bone is connected to the
I-bahn. – William Mitchell, 1994~~~The sharp-edged technology
of the NII can cut a number of ways: It can enlarge the domain of the
commodifiers and controllers; it can serve the resistance
to these forces; it can saturate us all, controlled and
controllers alike, in a virtual alternative to the real
world. Meanwhile, most of humanity will live and die
deprived of the wonders of the NII, or indeed the joys of
adequate nutrition, medical care, and housing. We would
do well to regulate our enthusiasms accordingly - that
is, to remember where love and mercy have their natural
homes, in that same material world. Otherwise we will
have built yet another pharaonic monument to wealth,
avarice, and indifference. We will have proved the
technophobes right. More to the point, we will have
collaborated to neglect the suffering of the damned of
the earth – our other selves – in order to
entertain ourselves. – Tom Maddox,
1994~~~How better to receive audio
communications than
through an earring, or to send spoken messages than
through your lapel? Jewelry that is blind, deaf, and dumb
just isn't earning its keep. Let's give cuff
links a job that justifies their name ... And a shoe
bottom makes much more sense than a laptop - to boot up,
you put on your boots. When you come home, before you
take off your coat, your shoes can talk to the carpet in
preparation for delivery of the day's personalized
news to your glasses. – Nicholas Negroponte, 1995~~~Pretty soon we're going
to have to grow software, and we should start learning how to do
that. We should have software that won't break when
something is wrong with it. As a friend of mine once
said, if you try to make a Boeing 747 six inches longer,
you have a problem; but a baby gets six inches longer 10
or more times during its life, and you never have to take
it down for maintenance. – Alan Kay, 1995~~~Today we have the Net, the
last accidentally uncensored mass
medium in existence.
Is it a toy of the rich and the ivory tower, or is it
potent? ... Will we allow ourselves to be possessed by
the vision of a Net whose purpose is to help create and
support HEROES? Or will we dismiss it all with a
keystroke and get back to the REAL FUN STUFF on
alt.flame.Joe.schmuck.the.world's.greatest.poophead?
– Steve Crocker, 1995~~~Are we headed toward a world
filled with anemic drones, laboring away at sterile keyboards,
never taking a moment to sniff the ragweed, never
twisting an ankle while tossing a Frisbee to their
flea-ridden dogs? Well, we might be. America, at least,
has been headed there for some time, roughly since the
invention of the fluorescent tube. The Internet, though,
is just a symptom of our technological cocoonery, not the
root cause. – Dinty Moore, 1995~~~In 2088, our branch on the
tree of life will come crashing down, ending a very modest (if critically
acclaimed) run on planet earth. The culprit? Not global
warming. Not atomic war. Not flesh-eating bacteria. Not
even too much television. The culprit is the integrated
circuit ... By 2090, the computer will be twice as smart
and twice as insightful as any human being. It will never
lose a game of chess, never forget a face, never forget
the lessons of history. By 2100, the gap will grow to the
point at which homo sapiens, relatively speaking, might
make a good pet. Then again, the computers of 2088 might
not give us a second thought. – Greg Blonder,
1995~~~The universal "we"
has lost a sense of rhythm, and is in danger of unbalancing the
thought and action cycle that drives creative human
behavior ... Where traveling through space physically
once buffered periods of mental activity, we are
squeezing out the inherent rest cycle associated with
going to libraries, face-to-face meetings, and going from
home to work ... The added convenience of
telecommunication-based collaboration, the umbrella
reason that new technologies are adopted within
organizations, carries with it this hidden cost of a loss
of pace as it throws us into the vacuum of electronic
space. – Stephen Acker, 1995~~~The robots will re-create us
any number of times,
whereas the original version of our world exists, at
most, only once. Therefore, statistically speaking,
it's much more likely we're living in a vast
simulation than in the original version. To me, the whole
concept of reality is rather absurd. But while you're
inside the scenario, you can't help but play by the
rules. So we might as well pretend this is real - even
though the chance things are as they seem is essentially
negligible. – Hans Moravec, 1995~~~No matter what circumstances
we face or
predilections we harbor, the business of living is love.
Getting love and keeping love. Manufacturing love. Making
love. Making love stay. And no worldwide web of cool
chips and hot wires is going to change that. So just shut
up about your Brave New World, bub; we've all still
got to live in the frightened old one. – Philip
Mart, 1995 |
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