John Smart
President, Acceleration Studies Foundation
Philosophers have long noted that their children were born into a more complex world than that of their ancestors. This early and perhaps even unconscious recognition of accelerating change may have been the catalyst for much of the utopian, apocalyptic, and millennialist thinking in our Western tradition. But the modern difference is that now everyone notices the pace of progress on some level, not simply the visionaries.
Biography
John Smart is a developmental systems theorist who studies accelerating change, computational autonomy, and the singularity. He is President of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit community for research, education, consulting, and selected advocacy of communities and technologies of accelerating change. He co-produces the annual Accelerating Change Conference, an annual meeting of 350 change-leaders and students at Stanford University, and edits ASF's free newsletter, Accelerating Times, read by future-oriented thinkers around the world. He is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, the FBI Futures Working Group, and the editorial advisory board of Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
Smart has a degree in Business from the Haas School at U.C. Berkeley and seven years of coursework in biological, medical, cognitive, computer and physical science at UCLA, Berkeley, and UCSD. He is the author of Planning a Life in Medicine, 2005, for premedical students. He's currently completing a M.S. in Future Studies at the University of Houston and writing his second book, on the topic of accelerating change.