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I've actually tried not to call myself a futurist for the last 25 years. I prefer forecaster, but people call me a futurist, and it doesn't really bother me.

Paul Saffo

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Paul Saffo
Age: 54
Essayist
Professor
Paul L. Saffo
Doesn
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Really
Prefer
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More quotes by Paul Saffo

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The best way to let people go is to let them know when they're hired that it's an uncertain environment and that their job is always at risk and even if you let them go, it's not that you don't love them.
Paul Saffo
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Using technology merely to lower operational costs amounts to standing on a whale fishing for minnows. It just allows you to do the old thing more efficiently, where in this moment of deep transformation, it is much more likely that you should be doing something entirely new in an entirely different way.
Paul Saffo
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This new world of personal media - the Web, the Internet and et cetera - not only delivers the world to your living rooms, but everywhere. And we get to answer back. And we're expected to answer back.
Paul Saffo
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Sometimes I think we're on this world for three reasons: to be useful, to tell each other stories and to collect stuff. It's the only explanation for eBay. We love to collect stuff, and at least if we're collecting stuff in cyberspace we're not deforesting the Sierra Nevada.
Paul Saffo
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Never mistake a clearer view for a short distance just because the technology looks like it's about to arrive in the very near future. Chances are there will be some surprises and in the long run even the most expected of futures tends to arrive late and in completely unexpected ways.
Paul Saffo
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Though I carry enough electronics to get nervous in a lightning storm, I love paper and I always have a Moleskine journal with me to capture notes, conversations and ideas.
Paul Saffo
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I worry about a society that can remember everything.
Paul Saffo
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I think the most important thing that a company can do, not just in the customer space but the employee space, is to be completely open and completely honest. Don't pretend that you're doing something that you can not do. There's an old saying in Silicon Valley, It's not a bug. It's a feature.
Paul Saffo
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Each time you toss out a 'singing' greeting card, you are disposing of more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1950.
Paul Saffo
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I can't imagine how you can find the discipline to be emotionally detached reporting on a revolution, the winds of which are blowing right down the hallways of the publication you work for. That's like an orthopedic surgeon trying to perform arthroscopic surgery on their own knee. It's possible, but it's hard to see through all the pain.
Paul Saffo
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Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.
Paul Saffo
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I live on a canyon at the edge of San Mateo. We are fortunate to have lots of suburban wildlife as our neighbors, though I kind of wish the rattlesnakes would stop curling up by our back door.
Paul Saffo
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Point of view is that quintessentially human solution to information overload, an intuitive process of reducing things to an essential relevant and manageable minimum... In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources...
Paul Saffo
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It's interesting to see the lament of each generation overwhelmed by the next new tool. I can show you passages from scholars of Germany in the 1480s lamenting the fact that they are overloaded with all this stuff to read because of the printing press.
Paul Saffo
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Every day huge amounts of information break off like icebergs and melt away. What worries me is that much information in electronic form is never reduced to paper. Some people have described this as being on the edge of a digital Dark Age and fear we may commit a massive act of amnesia.
Paul Saffo
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Before the iPhone, cyberspace was something you went to your desk to visit. Now cyberspace is something you carry in your pocket.
Paul Saffo
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It will take a decade or two, but fundamentalism is going to burn itself.
Paul Saffo
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Responding to climate change will become the obsession of the next decade in much the same way terrorism was this decade's obsession.
Paul Saffo
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Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions.
Paul Saffo
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More information and more communications foster world peace and understanding. But connecting extremist nut cases together on the Web - whatever flavor extremism they are - is a really bad thing. More information may not be a good thing, either.
Paul Saffo