John Smart
John Smart
John Smart is a developmental systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on accelerating change, computational autonomy (human-independent machine learning) and a hypothesis known in futurist circles as the technological singularity (increasingly generalized human-surpassing machine intelligence). He is the founder and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF, Accelerating.org) a nonprofit community that seeks to help individuals better understand and manage continuous accelerating change.
He has a BS in business from the Haas school at UC Berkeley, has done graduate work in human physiology and medicine at UC San Diego, and post baccalaureate coursework in biological, cognitive, computer and physical sciences at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UCSD In May 2007 he will complete an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston, and begin a distance (part time and mostly online) PhD in Futures Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in Leeds, UK. He has authored one book, Planning a Life in Medicine, 2005 (Random House), for premedical students, and is presently writing a second, on the topic of accelerating change. He produces ASF's conference, Accelerating Change (AC2005, Stanford University, September 16-18, 2005) a place where 350 science, technology, business and social activist speakers and attendees debate and explicate the topic of accelerating change. He is on the editorial advisory board of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, an affiliate of the ECCO group at VUB, and a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, the FBI Futures Working Group, IEEE, and ITEA. He serves on the board of two nonprofits, the Conversations Network and KnowledgeContext.org. Prior to ASF he was co-founder and CEO of Hyperlearning, a 50-employee tutorial and test preparation company, sold to The Princeton Review in 1996.
