SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking Quotes

“Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” Any”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That’s why we are science fiction writers, not scientists.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“Bots are at best narrow AI, nothing that would make a cleric remotely nervous. But they would scare the hell out of epidemiologists who understand that parasites don’t need to be smart to be dangerous.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“Bateson proposed that the metaphor of "mother Earth" is no longer accurate or helpful. Human impact on nature is now so complete and irreversible that we're better off thinking of the planet as if it were our first child. It will be here after us. Its future is unknown and uncontrollable. We are forced to plan ahead for it. Our first obligation is to keep it from harm. We are learning from it how to be decent parents.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“Weisman's book, The World Without Us, grew out of two questions, he said. One was, "How can I write a best-seller about the environment?" The answer to that was the second question: "How would the rest of nature behave without the constant pressure we put on it?”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“Allen: “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Panic”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“We seem trapped in the Short Now. The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking

“George ended by looking at the larger picture. He said that computation at present is still parasitic on us, but it probably is in the process of becoming part of life itself---it's just another system of genetics. Evolution, after all, is massively parallel computation, and now the world of code is evolving, perhaps to reshape the tree of life itself.”
― Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking