I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course — the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.

The Internet is now assumed to be a permanent fixture of human life. I doubt it will work out that way. It has been interesting while it lasted but I’m persuaded that it will not last very far into the future. Our resource limits are too stark and pressing. The electronic server “farms” composed of massed computers require too much electricity. Networked computing is unlikely to shift soon enough (if ever) to less energy-intensive nanomachines, or computers that run “biologically,” or anything else currently on the wish list for new leaps forward. The computer industry shows little interest in our fundamental resource limits. All this will come as a huge and unhappy surprise for people accustomed to thinking of technological progress as both inevitable and a kind of entitlement. We've been so dazzled by the magic of computers that we were not paying attention to what has happened in the background. A greater irony is that the Internet, including so-called social media and cell phones, is facilitating the first stages of epochal social unrest that will synchronize with the contractions in energy and economic activity that await us presently. Angry youth may be out rioting in the streets when their cell phone service goes dark for good.

By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

At best, the Internet will remain a space of freedom for a year or two, but, within a few years, it will most probably have fallen into the hands of big capital, and then the controls will be put in place. The other danger is that, along with the control mechanisms, the informational bureaucracies — precisely in order to avoid an information Chernobyl — will also expand. Thus, together, big capital and the informational bureaucracies may well simply scuttle the liberalisation of information.

I feel like I'm really just getting started. I don't know what's going to happen in the next five or ten years.

If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

The internet plumbing years are over - The internet intelligent years are ahead.

At the beginning of a decade it is tempting to look ahead for the next ten years.

I don't really have any big plans for 2008.

Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years. Uh, ;-)

The problems we see today are going to be a hell of a lot worse in 10 years if we're not willing to face up to them. These kids are just not going to be absorbed into the economy, so what are they going to be doing? Well, we know. They're going to be making life pretty miserable for a lot of people.

I do not believe there is a long-term future for the privately rented sector in its present form.

The Internet isn't my thing. I so much rather talk on the phone.