John Smart

Acceleration Watch is dedicated to helping people to understand and better manage accelerating change in the remaining decades of the era of narrowly-intelligent machines. Its primary author is John Smart.

I am a futures scholar and systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on accelerating change, evolutionary development, computational autonomy (human-independent machine learning) and a hypothesis known in futurist circles as the technological singularity (increasingly generalized human-surpassing machine intellignce). I'm 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.

I have a B.S. in business from the Haas school at U.C. Berkeley, an M.S. in Futures Studies from the University of Houston, and have done undergrad, postbaccalaureate and graduate work in medical, biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at U.C. San Diego, U.C.L.A., and U.C. Berkeley. I have authored one book, Planning a Life in Medicine, 2005 (Random House), for premedical students, and am presently writing my second, on the topic of accelerating change.

I co-produce ASF's occasional conferences, 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, and Evo Devo Universe (EDU 2008, Ecole Normale Superiere, October 8-9, 2008), an international interdisciplinary research community where scholars critique models and hypotheses of evolutionary and developmental process, considered at universal and subsystem scales.

I am a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, the FBI Futures Working Group, the International Technology Education Association, and the IEEE. I am an affiliate member of the Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition (ECCO) group at the Free University of Brussels, and serve on the advisory boards of the Conversations Network, Doug Kaye's podcasting confederation, and KnowledgeContext.org, Miguel Aznar's tech literacy nonprofit. Prior to ASF I was co-founder and CEO of Hyperlearning, a 50-employee tutorial and test preparation company, sold to The Princeton Review in 1996.

It is said we each journey as far as our environment and networks allow us. I became a systems thinker at an early age primarily due to loving parents and supportive friends. I'm one of three children (John, Leslie, and Paul) of John Edward Smart and Beatrice Lyyli Smart, two wonderful individuals who met as employees of IBM in the mid-1950's, the pioneering years of "big iron" computing. My uncle, Bill Smart, did time and motion efficiency studies for firms in the UK.

One of my long-term professional goals is to find sponsors interested in the development of generalist multidisciplinary programs for futures studies/strategic foresight, acceleration studies, and universal evolutionary development studies. More information on this may be found under degree programs.

Select publications (audio, video and text), and consulting services. I live in Mountain View, CA.

[Email: johnsmart{at}accelerating{dot}org]