Paul Saffo is a forecaster and essayist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. He teaches at Stanford University and is on a research sabbatical from Institute for the Future, where he has worked since 1985. He was the founding Chairman of the Samsung Science Board, and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation, the Singapore National Research Foundation Science Advisory Board and is an Advisor to Red Planet Capital, and 3i Venture Capital.
At the 2007 Singularity Summit hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he took a moment to look back from our present vantage point at visions of AI from previous decades. Just as William Gibson imagined cyberspace in a way that shaped the 1990s Internet revolution, a poet named Richard Brautigan writing in San Francisco almost exactly 40 years ago penned his model for what a world of advanced AI should be.
