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. It's author is John M. Smart.

I am a technology foresight scholar, educator, consultant, and systems theorist in global processes of evolution, development, and accelerating change. My blog is EverSmarterWorld.com

I am president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF), (Mountain View, CA) a nonprofit technology foresight research and consultancy organization. I am also founder of FERN, the Foresight Education and Research Network, a professional association improving global foresight education, training, and careers.

I also a technical advisor to NextIT (Spokane, WA) a global leader in interactive virtual assistant (IVA) platforms. I have authored a number of next-gen IT foresight studies, including the Metaverse Roadmap, the Conversational Interface, and Open Internet TV.

As an educator I am lecturer in leadership and technological change at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), and advisor in foresight and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA), Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis's educational program in exponential technologies.

As a systems theorist, I am co-founder of the Evo Devo Universe research community, an international interdisciplinary community of scholars exploring evolutionary and developmental processes of change in physical, chemical, biological, and sociotechnical systems, and a member of the ECCO research group at VUB (Brussels, Belgium)

I have a B.S. in business administration from U.C. Berkeley, an M.S.-equivalency in physiology and medicine (two years of medical school and the USMLE-I) from U.C. San Diego School of Medicine, an M.S. in futures studies from the University of Houston, and have done additional undergraduate work in 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.

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.

For the first three years of ASF I co-produced Accelerating Change (AC2003, AC2004, and AC2005, Stanford University) a conference where 350 science, technology, business and social activist speakers and attendees debated and explicated the topic of accelerating change,

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.

To make wise decisions in the present, we must strive to deeply understand where we are in relation to the known past and our probable futures. Among other things, I believe this requires a global community that makes the disciplined development of the field of foresight a top priority. To that end, I co-founded the Foresight Education and Research Network (FERN) in 2010, a nonprofit community that networks foresight employers with students, and graduates of the twenty five M.S., Ph.D., and certificate programs in foresight around the world.

One of my long-term professional goals is to find sponsors interested in the development of more world-leading training programs in three academically neglected areas: technology foresight, acceleration studies, and evolutionary development theory. If you are interested in helping with that endeavor, or if I can help your organization with technology foresight consulting or speaking, please email me at the address below.

Connect with me on Linked In: John M Smart
My Short Posts on Google Plus: +JohnMSmart
My Blog, Ever Smarter World
My Nonprofit, Acceleration Studies Foundation
I live in Mountain View, CA.
Email: johnsmart{at}accelerating{dot}org