John Smart
Founder & President, Acceleration Studies Foundation
John Smart is a developmental systems theorist who studies accelerating change, computational autonomy, and technological singularities. 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. He serves as a director for the Global Futures Network, whose goal it is to help network all the worlds futurists, academic, professional, and lay, in the world's leading online social network, Facebook.
In 2006, he presented the talk "Systems Theories of Accelerating Change" at the Singularity Summit at Stanford. There he looked at accelerating change from universal, biological, human cultural, and technological perspectives, and introduced a few well known and unorthodox ideas in acceleration mechanics. There he posed the questions: What systems models do we presently have for long-range processes of accelerating change? What general patterns can we observe for "phase change" singularities in physical systems? What is the paradigm of universal evolutionary development, and how might it help us understand and navigate an era where we find ourselves increasingly outcompeted by our technological extensions? Why is the systematic study of accelerating change so valuable, and presently so underfunded? Looking briefly at accelerating change from universal, biological, human cultural, and technological perspectives, he proposed some models of the past and speculations for a future of increasing intelligence amplification (IA) in human society, and increasing autonomous intelligence (AI) in technology. He concluded with a call for greater scientific funding, transdisciplinarity, and acceleration awareness in an era of increasingly complex and powerful technologies.
video
Singularity Summit: Systems Theories of Accelerating Change
video
SIAI
Interview Series
transcripts
2006 Singularity Summit,
Systems Theories of Accelerating Change
SIAI Interview Series,
Speaking to the Web
audio
2006 Singularity Summit, 2006 Singularity Summit,
Systems Theories of Accelerating Change
SIAI Interview Series,
Speaking to the Web