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 author is John M. Smart.

I am a technology foresight consultant, scholar, educator, 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), (Los Gatos, 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 am 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.

I'm also a lecturer in leadership and technological change at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), and an advisor in foresight and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA), Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis's exponential technologies incubator.

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 I've done postbaccalaureate undergraduate work in molecular 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 foresight 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 today, we must understand where we are in relation to both the measurable past and to our probable, possible, and preferable futures. Among other things, I believe this requires the disciplined development of the field of strategic foresight as 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 developing world-leading professional training programs in three critically important yet presently 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.

My Home Page: JohnMSmart.com
My Blog, Ever Smarter World
Twitter: @johnmsmart
Linked In: John M Smart
Our Nonprofit, Acceleration Studies Foundation
I live in Los Gatos, CA.
Email: johnsmart{at}accelerating{dot}org