“When you develop a game you are inventing stuff that has never existed before. We are inventing not only the technology, not only the story, but also how we are going to implement this and what our first step is. With the game about the Milo character that we are working on at the moment it really started with our ability to create what we felt was a real living boy. That is how it started: how can we create something that feels alive? How will you be able to interact with that living thing? Will you be able to use your voice? Will you be able to give things to Milo? It started like that, rather than with thinking about the first scene in the story. It started with the boy being alive.”

Peter Molyneux, Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios

“The conventional view is that we are destroying our ecosystems with our technology and we should be fearful about it. We should gradually have laws and learn to consider the ecosystems in the equation. But this approach obviously falls short. Why don’t we have the awareness of turning off an electric bulb whenever we are not using it? This requires a different kind of relationship with nature. Nature is important not only because of fear that global warming is going to destroy all of us. The fear drive must be overruled by another drive which the new paradigm gives, which is the drive of love. I want to save the environment because I love the environment. Because the environment is me. It’s the same being.”

Amit Goswami, Professor of Physics and Quantum Activist

“There’s this concept of the precautionary principle, which says that whenever society is making a decision around the deployment of a technology, it should look closely at the possibility of a negative result. The opposite argument, the proactionary principle, says that as long as you can show that a good outcome will happen, then go ahead and do it. What struck me was that there’s room for another approach and I started to call it the reversibility principle. Taking in both arguments around precaution and proaction, the best strategy when deploying a new technology is to design that technology from the outset in a way to maximize the potential to pull back if you recognize a potentially critical problem.”

Jamais Cascio, Environmental and Ethical Futurist

“The fifth era of social commerce will have elements of collaboration, crowd sourcing, and also there will be a big shift to the influencers within a community, they will define more of the product and they will play a more integral role. There’s going to be other shifts too. In the most radical future PR agencies, interactive agencies, digital agencies could actually start representing the communities and go to the brand and say: ‘I’m representing my client, this community. Would you like to bid for their business?’”

Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategist and Senior Analyst at Forrester Research

“People often talk about how technology shapes generations. The idea being that much of what we are is the technology we grow up with. If you grow up with a transistor radio it sort of pushes you in a certain direction. If you grow up with a digital PDA it pushes you in another direction. Our perspective is rather different. It suggests that it’s more fruitful to look at how generations shape technology. It’s the opposite kind of causation. We think that certain generations want to move technology in certain directions according to what they want from the technology.”

Neil Howe, Historian, Economist, Demographer and Generation Specialist

“We buy because we want to portray an image to the rest of the world. We do not buy food at a premium price because we think it’s better or it tastes better. We think we do it, by the way, because of that. But typically it’s actually to show to the world that I can do it, I can make it, I can finally afford it, or by the way, this is who I am. So brands would not exist if you were the only one on planet earth, because you wouldn’t care then about what brand you would wear. You only care about that when you have people around you. So that´s the core concept of brand building.”

Martin Lindström, Marketing Guru and Author

“Human beings can become so enthusiastic about a technological breakthrough that it sometimes ends up with too much enthusiasm, which we then call hysteria or a bubble. In a certain way, bubbles are very well known to provoke a lot of damage financially, but in fact the progress that we make as human beings and as an economy, often goes through bubbles, through massive hysteria and optimism about new technologies, about something new. Then people invest massively in this new technology, and we call that ‘a bubble’. But on the other hand it’s also a breakthrough, a step-up to a better economy.”

Geert Noels, Economist and Author

“I think that if in more traditional times we were officially supposed to believe - you went to church - but privately we didn’t believe, everybody mocked religion, the paradox today is that I claim it’s the opposite. What is repressed is not our non-belief, but our belief. People publicly pretend, I’m cynical, I don’t believe, but secretly you believe. This mode of ideology I would call cynical, or in psychoanalytic terms fetishist. When somebody claims that he is totally cynical - I don’t believe in anything - you should look for what is his or her fetish. All these great cynics, if you look at them closely, have a private secret, something which is really dear to them, which they don’t want to talk about and believe in.”

Slavoj Zizek, Sociologist, Psychoanalyst, Philosopher, and Cultural Critic

“I used to be a Marxist myself when I was about fifteen. I think it was easier to believe in Marx at that time, before or during the Second World War, because there had been this slump in the 1920’s. I lived in the north of England where mining and shipbuilding were major industries, but when I was young, they collapsed. The pound was overvalued. I was used to a situation seeing a lot of unemployed people picking up cigarette butts. To my mind at that time, capitalism had no future. But when I worked in OECD I changed my position. It seemed to me that capitalism was not dead or dying. I think what has happened to the communist countries since 1990 or so shows that that system didn’t work.”

Angus Maddison, Economist