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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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Paul Saffo
Age: 54
Essayist
Professor
Paul L. Saffo
Even
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Never
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Expected
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More quotes by Paul Saffo

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I worry about a society that can remember everything.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Microsoft is a big intellectual roach motel. All the big minds go in, and they don't come out.
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It will take a decade or two, but fundamentalism is going to burn itself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions.
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We tend to use a new technology to do an old task more efficiently. We pave the cow paths.
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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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Before the iPhone, cyberspace was something you went to your desk to visit. Now cyberspace is something you carry in your pocket.
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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.
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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...
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Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.
Paul Saffo