Sound bites from Paul Saffo

- Almost like Einstein, saying “if only id’ known, I would have become a watchmaker”
- Technology is scaring the hell out of everyone right now, and the question is why is it scaring people?
-Luddites get a really bad rap
- What terrifies people … is that this stuff is making the world an unfamiliar place, and everyone’s scared because nothings familiar anymore
- Increasingly we become bystanders faced by technology
- I known some lawyers like that [who die in the presence of oxygen]
- Nothing truly new comes into our lives, ever, without a hidden curse
- Stewart Brand said it nicely: “ if technology is making us gods, then we’d better get good at it”
- [what are you most afraid of] stupid people. The thing that frightens me most about our country is that 9/11 seems to have dropped the collective. When people are afraid, your IQ drops. We’ve become pathologically short-term in our decision making. When the correct response to a crisis like this is to be more careful, and think longer term.
- We picked the wrong metaphor for this problem.
- There are plenty of technologies that scare the living bejesus out of me, but what really scares me are people making really bad decisions
- We have this thing called history, and we can learn a lot from history. Getting that historical perspective leads to better decision making in the present
- People in the late 1700s went through bigger changes than we did