John Smart

John Smart is president of the nonprofit Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) a community for research, education, and selected advocacy of communities and technologies of accelerating change. He co-produces the annual Accelerating Change conference—a meeting of 350 change-leaders each fall at Stanford University—and edits ASF's free newsletter, Accelerating Times, read by future-oriented thinkers around the world.

John is a developmental systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on accelerating change, computational autonomy (human-independent machine learning) and the implications of a hypothesis known in futurist circles as the technological singularity (a possible future of increasingly human-surpassing machine intelligence, see http://accelerationwatch.com/). He is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists and the FBI Futures Working Group, and serves on the editorial advisory board of Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

John has a B.S. in Business from the Haas School at UC Berkeley and six years of coursework in biological, medical, cognitive, computer and physical science at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego. He's currently completing an M.S. in Future Studies at U. Houston and writing his second book on the topic of accelerating change. His first book, Planning a Life in Medicine (for premedical students), was published by Random House in March 2005. John lives in Los Angeles, CA and can be reached at johnsmart@accelerating.org