Science Fiction Writers - Janet E. Morris

"But people don't go after information themselves, they believe what they hear. This is, historically, the failing of democracy. You have mass rule and you have ascendancy of the mediocre. It's happening in science fiction too. You get a readership which is wider, editors who are only doing science fiction on the way to something more exciting, such as women's romances, and therefore you get mediocre science fiction.

From the book Dream Makers by Charles Platt. 

Science Fiction Writers - Poul Anderson

"I've been interested off and on in the fact that if this industrial civilization of ours suffers a hiatus, we may never be able to rebuild it, not because the knowledge will be lacking but because we won't have the rich natural resources on which the first civilization was founded."

From the book Dream Makers 2 by Charles Platt.

Null Infinity - Chapter 4

If you are reading along, chapter 4 of the novel(?) Null Infinity has been posted. Find the new installment under the Forgotten Earth Universe tab above. Thank you. 

Futurist Alvin Toffler - Institutional Collapse

"Systems do change, and institutions do collapse and die, and new ones spring up. One way this happens is by internal restructuring in a coup d'etat, as the young turks take over from the old turks. Usually this is in response to great external pressures on the system. Another possibility is that outsiders simply topple the institution and create a new one.

Futurist Alvin Toffler - Obsolete Institutions

"Some of our best-known leaders in business and industry are actually very intelligent people, but they make very unintelligent decisions. I think the explanation of this paradox lies in the decision-making institutions. I believe that our institutions are stupid, because they're obsolete, and you could put teams of geniuses to work in those institutions and the results would still be stupid."

From an interview by Charles Platt in the book "Dream Makers 2" forty years ago.

Futurist Alvin Toffler - Unanticipated Consequences

"The peculiar position we find ourselves in today challenges the old political assumptions that have been made by radicals of both Right and Left, that an elite is running things for its own advantage, against our best interests. That presupposes that the decisions being taken by an elite will actually bring about the results which they anticipate.

Futurist Alvin Toffler - Economic Disruption

"We're not going to go through a classical depression or classical inflation. What we're seeing is the emergence of a differentiated society. While some people are eating dog food, there's money to burn in other communities - the sharp contrast between a Second-Wave community like Youngstown or Detroit, and embryonic Third-Wave

Null Infinity - Chapter 3

If you are reading along, the next chapter of the novel(?) Null Infinity has been posted. Find the new installment under the Forgotten Earth Universe tab above. Thank you. 

Science Fiction Writers - Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur Clarke writing in the 1960s:

Whatever the eventual outcome of our exploration of space we can be reasonably certain of some immediate benefits - and I am deliberately ignoring such 'practical' returns as the multi-billion dollar improvements in weather forecasting and

AI #5

It is also worth noting that significant subsets of the AI community are motivated by forms of open-source ideology that consider it desirable to deploy AGI systems with effectively no safeguards, in the interest of promoting technological advancement at any cost.