Trying to do what your competitors are doing but basically a little bit better is probably not going to be the winning strategy. The problem is finding what your competitors wouldn't even consider doing.

Human civilization has been changing the Earth's environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers – all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.

As useful as websites and journals are, there’s real value in books, too.

Don’t expect to be able to upload your cat’s brain into your Roomba any time soon.

As our various electronic devices gain more and more sensory awareness, we open up the potential for entirely new forms of interaction. Not just new interfaces – tapping and shaking and whatnot – but a shift in presence.

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.

Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we’d still face decades of warming.

It’s remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.

It’s a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.