Top 40 Jamais Cascio Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Jamais Cascio

Featured in: Resilience Quotes

2. “Human civilization has been changing the Earths 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.”

— Jamais Cascio

3. “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

4. “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

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

— Jamais Cascio

6. “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

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

— Jamais Cascio

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Future forecasting is all about testing strategies – it’s like a wind tunnel.”

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

13. “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

14. “By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.”

— Jamais Cascio

15. “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 wouldnt even consider doing.”

— Jamais Cascio

16. “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

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

— Jamais Cascio

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Jamais Cascio

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Jamais Cascio

24. “Is there a better example of natural selection in action than ‘Project Runway?’”

— Jamais Cascio

25. “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

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

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

28. “Nature stopped being natural decades ago.”

— Jamais Cascio

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

32. “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.”

— Jamais Cascio

33. “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

34. “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

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

— Jamais Cascio

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

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

— Jamais Cascio

42. “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