Don Tapscott Quotes

There is little doubt that we are in the midst of a revolution of a much more profound and fundamental nature than the social and political revolutions of the last half century.

The world has entered an era of the most profound and challenging change in human history.

I'm a history buff, and right now we're sitting on one of the most dramatic historical shifts that this planet has ever seen and we have a front row seat for it.

Probably people always feel that they are living in a time of transition, but we can hardly be mistaken perhaps in thinking that this is an era of particularly momentous change, rapid and proceeding at an ever quickening rate.

The globe is shrinking, the information age is bringing a lot of changes. People are anxious about their future and their children's futures.

This world is clearly emerging before our eyes. The shifts ahead, the opportunities ahead are massive.

If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.

We are living in one of those rare moments in history when things may come apart and be put back together again in ways that will determine the future for decades or more, despite the endless innovations of technology.

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

A totally new era in the history of mankind.

Every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Across all the globe there harshly blow the winds of change

Everything we have learned in the last 15,000 years will be swept away in the coming years…. The next hundred years will produce more changes than have taken place in the last 100,000 years. Indeed, the last 100 years have produced more change than the last 100,000 years.

Abroad, technological change will create even more disruption as the wave of acceleration engulfs societies that have not yet come to terms with the social demands of industrialization, let alone more recent technological change. Mass disorientation can become the source of both national aggression and non-state terrorism—aggression and terrorism made all the more devastating by access to weapons that are not only increasingly powerful but also deployable by ever smaller groups.

While the digital transformation of industries will be profound, we must keep in mind that it will have wider economic and social impact, too, as with previous revolutions driven by steam and coal, electricity and computers.

That which is the wonder of one age is the commonplace of the next.

To join in the industrial revolution, you needed to open a factory; in the Internet revolution, you need to open a laptop.

I believe, 50 years from now, when you write history, one technology that would have changed human civilization is going to be the mobile Internet.

Sitting here at the beginning of the 21st century, we're only 200 years into the industrial revolution. We don't have an enormous dataset to draw on, so whatever shaped curve we're on, we're only at the beginning of it.

I'm not a futurist, so I don't spend a lot of time thinking about 20 years from now.

The computer is a mechanism for acceleration: it accelerates economic activity, and this is eating up the world. It's eating up resources, it's processing, it's manufacturing, it's distributing, it's consuming. That's what the computer's real work does, and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop, just to satisfy our own narrow needs.

When tulip mania dies down, all that remains are pretty flowers. When bubbles burst, nothing is left but soapy residue. But the Internet revolution, for all its speculative excesses, really is changing the world.

As a factual matter, as in countries all over the world, technology and business practices have been running faster than legal responses and developments.

I absolutely believe that we are on the cusp of not just a technological revolution, but a productivity revolution. It will bring benefits for people everywhere, make our planet more sustainable, and provide new opportunities for businesses of all kinds.

We humans are still a very primitive culture, and it's one of the traps we've fallen into over the course of our lives - to forget our history. That's why George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' is so profound. It chronicles our short memory.