Uncharted Quotes

“On a voyage of exploration, how can you price what you’ll find before you even set sail?”
― Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How to Map the Future

“In business,” Siilasmaa said, “we forget that we are human. Many strong leaders think they should not be friends with their colleagues. I disagree. Business is emotional. I like to be friends with my colleagues. You get through a crisis because you care so much.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future

“This is the thinking behind Amazon’s anticipatory shopping patent.43 Instead of customers making their own decisions, Amazon decides for them, sending what they want before they know they want it. It is, as one commentator noticed, one more step towards cutting out human agency altogether.44 Pervasive monitoring devices – smartphones, wearables, voice-enabled speakers and smart meters – allow companies to track and manage consumer behaviour. The Harvard business scholar Shoshana Zuboff quotes an unnamed chief data scientist who explains: ‘The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale . . . we can capture their behaviours and identify good and bad [ones]. Then we develop “treatments” or “data pellets” that select good behaviours.’45 MIT’s Alex Pentland seems more interested in enhancing machines than human understanding. He celebrates the opportunity to deploy sensors and data in order to increase efficiency”
― Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How to Map the Future

“When we trade the effort of doubt and debate for the ease of blind faith, we become gullible and exposed, passive and irresponsible observers of our own lives. Worse still, we leave ourselves wide open to those who profit by influencing our behavior, our thinking, and our choices. At that moment, our agency in our own lives is in jeopardy.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future

“Existential crises are intense experiences of free will, the possibility of choice.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future

“Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart,” Rilke wrote, advising a young poet, “and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.… Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.… [T]his is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.”9”
― Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future

“Online research gives us information faster but it doesn’t last as long. The more we multitask, switching as frequently as every nineteen seconds between diverse sources of information and entertainment, the less capacity we develop to pay and hold attention.17 As scans reveal the physical changes this activity imposes on our brains, the downside of neuroplasticity becomes visible: all the gestational work of artists slips from our grasp.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future