We are as gods and might as well get used to it.

I see God in the instruments and the mechanisms that work reliably. more reliably than the limited sensory departments of the human mechanisms.

Forms are inherently visible and forms no longer can “follow functions” because the significant functions are invisible…

Industrialization’s wealth is cumulative in contradiction to the inherently terminal, discontinuous, temporary wealth of the craft eras of civilization such as the Bronze Age or Stone Age. If we only understood how that cumulative industrial wealth has came about, we could stop playing obsolete games.

There are very few men today who are disciplined to comprehend the totally integrating significance of the 99 percent invisible activity which is coalescing to reshape our future. There are approximately no warnings being given to society regarding the great changes ahead.

As a result, we have attempted to control the fluids in ways contrary to their nature, and the results are evident in the problems of pollution, damage to the ecosystem, and even drying up of natural water sources.

I then explained that I believe - and am acting upon - Marshal McLuhan’s statement that we have through electronic technology produced an extension of our brains to the world formerly outside of us.

To me that means that the disciplines, gradual and sudden (principally Oriental), formerly practiced by individuals to pacify their minds, bringing them into accord with ultimate reality, must now be practiced socially - that is, not just inside our heads, but outside of them, in the world, where our central nervous system now is.

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension between opposites.

The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological kind, but are psychic events.

It is the great public which is demanding the utmost of secrecy for modern science in all things which may touch its military uses. This demanded secrecy is scarcely more than the wish of a sick civilization not to learn the progress of its own disease.

The revolutions in the history of science are successful escapes from blind allays. The evolution of knowledge is continuos only during those periods of consolidation and elaboration which follow a major break-through.

But the theoretical structure which emerges from the break-through is not built on top of the previous ediface; it branches out from the point where progress has gone wrong.

True novelties are not derived directly from a previous adult theory, but from a new seminal idea.

We are what we think our future is.

If computer capacities were to continue to increase by a factor of ten every two or three years until the end of the century (a factor between a hundred billion and then quadrillion), then all current concepts about computer limitations will have to be reconsidered. Even if the trend continues for only the next decade or two, the improvements over current computers would be factors of thousands or millions.

If we add the likely enormous improvements of input-output devices, programming and problem formulation, and better understanding of the basic phenomena being studied, manipulated, or simulated, these estimates of improvement might by wildly conservative.

Future study is like education: everybody thinks they’re good at it.

Are we at a new society- load sharing intelligently put together, one that will someday reveal the load bearing pillars of today’s arrangement as totally unnecessary.

Will these pillars of society as they feel the structure trembling to lift up and away attach themselves hoping to hold it down, hoping to keep the status quo. Will that be a joke- something pretending to carry while being carried?

Just think what a nice day it is, how pretty the flowers are, and the blue sky. Think how lucky you are to be doing this kind of work when the rest of the world is doing all the things you do not want to do.

In other words, I am interested in the processes of finding metaprograms (and methods and substances) which control, change, and create the basic metaprograms of the human computer.

The computer is almost exactly what man is not. It is capable of paying undivided attention to unlimited detail; it is immune to distraction, precise and reliable; it can carry out the most intricate and lengthy calculation with ease, without a flaw and in much less time than a millionth of the time that would be required by its human counterpart. It is emotionless or so we suppose. It suffer neither boredom nor fatigue.

To predict the future of a curve is to carry out a certain operation on its past.

I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries […]

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutual programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

As opposed to the lack of meaningful direction in today’s American society, a conscious sense of purpose is the actualizing force if the community is to be more than a particularization of the social malaise it seeks to answer.

The new communities must design for a new life for man, and only through them can a new architecture of living and expanding be achieved.

Once you’ve built one computer you have a far more sophisticated relationship with all computers.

Black box business.

[…] the creative act has a revolutionary or destructive side.