Imagine! "Technology does not drive change at all. Technology merely enables change. It's our collective cultural response to the options and opportunities presented by technology that drives change."
Paul Saffo is Director at Institute for the Future, a management consulting foundation. Providing long-range planning and forecasting services to Fortune 100 companies and government agencies, Paul is a specialist in long-term social and commercial impacts of new information technologies.
Paul Saffo also contributes an occasional column to Wired, and his essays on information and media trends have appeared in a variety of publications including PC Computing Magazine,Infoworld Magazine, MacWeek, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Fortune Magazine. Paul remarked that as commentator, his task was an easy one considering the credits each artist had attained.
Selected Books Available for purchase from Amazon.com
The biotech future: Paul Saffo- American futurist Paul Saffo warned the World Economic Forum the revolution in biotechnology will make the digital revolution seem mild by comparison. He talks with Tony Jones of LATELINE and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Paul Saffo on dot.com Greed and Giving - Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, comments on the charitable efforts of companies that grew from high-tech start-ups to wealthy public organizations. A CNN presentation.
Cyberpunk R.I.P.- Like a sun-grazing comet on a deep-space trajectory, the cyberpunk movement is disappearing as quickly as it arrived just a few years ago. Moreover, the movement was hardly more substantial than a comet's fuzzy tail when it came to numbers - there were never more than 100 hard-core cyberpunks at any time before the term hit the mainstream press.
The Oracle- "For most of this century we have viewed communications as a conduit, a pipe between physical locations on the planet. What's happened now is that the conduit has become so big and interesting that communication has become more than a conduit, it has become a destination in its own right - what in the vernacular is called cyberspace."
Smart Sensors Focus on the Future- Among Saffo's abiding concerns is the coming revolution in sensors: tiny Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, or MEMS, which he believes we'll soon find in everything from cereal boxes to factory systems—and that can be applied to solving a wide variety of IT problems in data-switching and storage.
It's Insane, But Simple - Although the "future forecaster's" standard criteria for a good prediction of the future is that the concept is plausible, believable, and internally consistent, in reality, the future usually turns out to be outlandish, unlikely, and unexpected. Only in hindsight can it be understood simply.
