I'm a futurist.
People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.
History is really a study of the future, not the past.
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.
Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.
I like to think of it as this new field. Instead of computer science, it's going to be virtual science.
Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.
Technology is going to transform people's lives and society everywhere in the world. I spend most of my time studying new technologies. My main task is to understand what's going on and try to see where we can fit in.
Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.
By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.
The valid research for the future is on the inner side, on the spiritual side.
Being able to do research in a real-time way is the way research needs to be done in the future.
I enjoy thinking about how race plays out over the centuries, how technology evolves, how cities transform themselves. These subjects are present in some of my books and absent in others.
A Singularitarian is someone who understands the Singularity and has reflected on its meaning for his or her own life.
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
Another goal is to look to the resources we have and to see how we could do better to plan, in a sense, for the faculty and infrastructure that we will need to study Asia well into the 21st century.
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.
