Neil Gershenfeld: Today's advanced research and education institutions are essential to tackling the grand challenges facing our planet, but they've been based on an implicit assumption of technological scarcity — advances in those technologies now allow these activities to expand far beyond the boundaries of a campus. Research requires funding, facilities, and people; I came to MIT to get access to all of these. State-of-the-art research infrastructure, large library collections, and world-class faculty are all expensive resources that limit admission slots, classroom space, and research positions. But what would happen if these things were no longer scarce?
Recently, Bernardo Huberman: Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.
Richard Hamming: If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.
Seth Godin: One day, you may be lucky enough to have a scarcity problem.
David Lynch: Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.
David Isenberg: The shift from scarcity to plenty is often the harbinger of new value propositions.
Finally: Courtesy of CIBC World Markets, you too can peer ahead into The Age of Scarcity!
Is MIT Obsolete? | 
