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I worry about a society that can remember everything.

Paul Saffo

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Paul Saffo
Age: 54
Essayist
Professor
Paul L. Saffo
Everything
Worry
Society
Remember

More quotes by 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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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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You don't want to rely on an expert to tell you what lies ahead.
Paul Saffo
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My advice is don't use technology primarily to lower costs. Use technology to create new, effective ways of touching the market and creating new businesses and if you do that right, the cost savings will come.
Paul Saffo
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I think it is just a matter of time before we have literal ghosts in the machine so you can create an alter ego of yourself that learns from your social experiences and extends a life even if you're no longer in the game or you are no longer alive.
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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We tend to use a new technology to do an old task more efficiently. We pave the cow paths.
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
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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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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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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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Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.
Paul Saffo
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The Web is a compelling new medium being put to all kinds of uses, by everyone from banks to Cub Scouts to flying saucer cults. That said, it can also be a powerful folly amplifier.
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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I'm actually an optimist about what lies ahead. Are wikis reliable? It depends on the specific business. Is Wikipedia reliable? You bet. Wikipedia is a researcher's dream.
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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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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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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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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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