• "(M)aking music is fundamentally a social phenomenon that actually creates a physical coupling between otherwise separate neurosystems." - Howard Rheingold (in the January 2003 issue of Wired Magazine)
  
• "You can't look at humanity separate from machines. We're so intertwined we're almost the same species, and the difference is getting smaller." - Sims creator Wil Wright (in the November 2002 issue of Wired Magazine)
  
• "We are now at a juncture that organic life has been moving toward for a long time. I think natural selection was likely to create an intelligent, self-conscious, morally rich species capable of reflective choice. And cultural evolution was very likely to get us where we are today, which is on the verge of global social organization, but still at a point where we have the possibility of blowing the whole thing up or ushering in an era of peace and order. Which of these routes we take as a species depends on the degree to which we're able to cast aside some of the egocentric moral biases that were built into us by biological evolution. The intimations of higher purpose are optional. - Robert Wright (in the December 2002 issue of Wired Magazine)
  
• "When engineering types speak highly of some science fiction writer, usually it's not because that person predicted the future. Rather, it's because he or she put together some disparate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map by the people who are actually deploying such a technology." - Neil Stephenson (in the September 2003 issue of Wired Magazine)

While most business leaders seem to be preaching "the future is dead," Robert Hof's "The Quest for the Next Big Thing" article in Business Week paints a more optimistic picture:

By the time I sit down to write, it feels like the tech industry is finally starting to turn around -- and that maybe what I discovered has a chance to produce something big. Indeed, the journey itself made me realize things weren't as dead as they seemed.

And yet, as described in this article on validation of the "six degrees" phenomenon published in Nature: "(E)ven if global social networks can be searched quite easily, a searcher may not exploit this asset unless he realizes the strength of his connectedness and has sufficient motive to make the effort."

Kenneth Chang reports in his New York Times article:

24,613 e-mail chains that were started, a mere 384, or fewer than 2 percent, reached their targets. The successful chains arrived quickly, requiring only four steps to get there. The rest foundered when someone in the middle did not forward the e-mail (and, of those who did not forward a message) less than 1 percent replied that they could not think of anyone to send the e-mail message to, suggesting that most simply did not want to be bothered.

Dr. Duncan J. Watts, the senior author of Columbia's Small World Experiement paper, sums up the practical value: "You can ask a friend of a friend for a favor, but that's about it."

This recent article in Discover Magazine suggests that thousands of laboratory trials my be drawing conclusions from insane mice.

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil has recently published a free e-book called The Ray Kurzweil Reader (pdf), "a collection of essays... on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world."