Acceleration Studies Foundation

Improving the Way We Look at the Future.

Our Mission:

ASF is an educational 501(c)(3) nonprofit engaged in outreach, education, research, and selective advocacy with respect to issues of accelerating change. We seek:

1. To promote a multidisciplinary and critical understanding of accelerating processes of planetary and universal change, in service to better economic, political, social, professional and personal development.
2. To improve the methods individuals and organizations use to create, plan, benefit from, and predict the future by advancing such disciplines as Acceleration and Evo Devo Studies (applied in universal, biological, cultural, and technological domains), and Futures Studies ( innovation studies, planning, change management, forecasting, roadmapping, risk management, and other foresight methodologies).
3. To broadly help individuals, organizations, business, and society to discover and create a future of "exponential promise".

ASF Mission in Plain English

Our Priorities:

ASF explores our increasingly technological and computational world via four key services:

• advancing awareness and dialog through public Outreach,
• high school, undergraduate and graduate initiatives for Education,
• AEDS, roadmapping, forecasting, scenarios and other data-driven Research, and
• selected technological, economic, political and social Advocacy

with regard to accelerating processes of change.

Our Vision:

ASF general and research visions are outlined in our vision for the future.

Our Perspective:

Five keywords describe our institutional orientation to accelerating change:

Acceleration-Aware/"Accelaware". Certain aspects of our local physical environment run faster and more autonomously every year, as they continually "do more, better, with less." We seek to better understand and guide accelerating systems to improve the world and ourselves.
Multidisciplinary. We cover not just technology and business, but some of the science driving recent accelerations, and major social implications. We consider not just individual, cultural, and national change, but also global and universal systems of change.
Developmental. We seek to discover and analyze highly probable science and technology developments, as opposed to more speculative or contingent futures, and ways to increase their benefits while decreasing their risks.
Farsighted. We explore not only 5 year, but also 20-30 year time horizons, and how to make better decisions today as a result. We believe that only by looking far enough into the future does it become clear that a special subset of continually accelerating computatonal and technological trends are the key enablers and shapers of our natural environment.
Professional. We recruit experienced practitioners who carefully think, study, act, and educate others on multifold trends in accelerating change.

Our Greater Goals

• We help people better understand, selectively predict, and guide accelerating developments in science and technology, and improve their impact on business and society.

• We explore the challenges and opportunities of converging technologies (infotech, nanotech, energy tech, biotech, sociotech), and the differences between evolutionary (unpredictable, contingent) and developmental (predictable, convergent) technological change.

• We seek funds for the development of an inaugural academic program in Acceleration Studies, and more Science and Technology Studies, Technology Policy, and Futures Studies degree programs globally.

• We advance the world's attention to these issues by networking considerate thinkers and organizing their literature and data.

• We encourage a proactive, “future shaping” attitude toward the future, as opposed to a reactive, “future shock” attitude, to make better personal and institutional choices in an accelerating world.

• We realize informed individuals create an informed society, thus we work to effect change one-on-one as well as in broader contexts.

If any of these are consistent with your personal or institutional goals, we urge you to lend your time and wisdom to our community.

In More Detail

The Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) is a nonprofit community of approximately sixty board members, associates and advisers, and a subscriber network of 3,100 executives, technologists, systems theorists, and futurists. (See the ASF definition of futurist).

ASF explores the accelerating development of special domains in science and technology, and examines their impact on business and society. In particular, we consider longstanding accelerating scientific and technological trends in computation, communication, storage, digitization, simulation, sensing, energy density, energy efficiency, miniaturization, autonomy, and others, and the way these developmental trends interact with business and social agendas. We seek to use this knowledge in service of greater personal, executive, and professional development.

We seek members whose values push them to be technology adapters and creators, to become financially endowed, politically engaged, socially responsible, global learners, local actors, and spiritually and self-aware. Individuals who don't put off the sometimes hard work of guiding the world to a better place, one person or institution at a time.

In today's fast-paced technological environment, we suggest that understanding accelerating change involves a new way of thinking, learning to see the most powerful and broadly applicable innovations, processes, trends, and physical efficiencies, and discovering where, when, and how to harness those to create value in the modern world.

Which technological and sociotechnical changes are presently occurring the fastest? Which are occurring the most broadly, and to greatest effect? For how long can we expect each trend to continue? What opportunities and challenges are created by today's spectrum of technological changes, both for the United States and for our rapidly globalizing neighbors?

We recognize that humanity's central choice in technology development is not a blind advocacy of acceleration, but a selective catalysis. Discovering which technologies (e.g., information and communication technologies, accountability technologies, democratizing technologies) hold the greatest promise, and preferentially advancing those in a beneficial manner, while regulating and delaying the destabilizing ones (e.g., weapons of mass destruction, dysfunctional and nonsustainable technologies), is the essence of our individual and social choice.

ASF emphasizes "developmental" technological roadmapping and forecasting, that is, we focus primarily on highly probable and convergent futures, based on intrinsic physical properties of the human sociotechnological infrastructure. We then seek to determine what choices and responsibilities we have within the framework of humanity's continually accelerating technological development. (For one account of exponential historical trends in the growth of computation, see Ray Kurzweil's "The Law of Accelerating Returns.")

This approach has occasionally been called "techno-transcendentalist" or "techno-utopian," and this critique has historical merit. While a number of generally defined computational capacities and efficiences have undergone predictable, sustained acceleration for decades (some even for centuries), many specific computer innovations (artificial intelligence, multimedia, the internet, wireless computing, nanocomputing) have been greatly oversold in the near-term.

Roy Amara of the Institute for the Future has said, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Nowhere is this observation more true than in technologies of computation, which have grown exponentially (or greater) over the history of human civilization, and at the same time becoming increasingly self-catalyzing (autonomous) in their replicative evolutionary development. Unfortunately, these profound observations are obscured by the fact that many weakly computationally-related technologies (jet engines, magnetic levitation, solar power, space travel, nanotechnology) have been much less impactful over the long-term than the original innovators imagined.

We must be careful not to ignore the near-term shortcomings, dangers, and unanticipated consequences of our technological capacities, as has been done in a long succession of promising new technologies in recent decades. We must also realize the deep intrinsic constraints on many programs of technological development. Much of our "top-down" driven biotechnology and genetic engineering, for example, will be significantly more technically and politically difficult than is commonly realized. At the same time, it is also clear that most of today's institutions are not appropriately realizing the near-term value and long-term transformational power of our accelerating and increasingly self-catalyzed information, communication, and computational technologies.

In our research capacity we seek to improve foresight and control of accelerating planetary changes via data-driven analysis, informed technological and social forecasting, technology roadmapping, the promotion of science, technology, business, and humanist dialogs, and the advancement of developmental systems theory using universal, global, and local perspectives. We investigate why increasingly fast, powerful, intelligent, and autonomous computing systems are continually emerging, whether they are likely to exceed human-level complexity during this century as increasing numbers of scholars are now proposing, and, if so, what we can do to make this evolutionary developmental path better serve human ends.

An important long-term goal for the foundation is to fundraise for the development of an educational institution, where professional degrees and certificate courses in technological and social forecasting and acceleration studies are offered to improve the long-term analysis, prediction, and management of our rapidly-changing technological world. As our models and measurements of accelerating change advance in coming years, we hope these issues will be discussed not simply by technologists and academics, but more broadly and deeply in human society.

Many futurist organizations, such as the World Future Society (WFS), focus on "evolutionary" future scenarios—seeking consensus on the preferable, given the imaginable. ASF, by contrast, focuses on "developmental" futures, seeking to discover that subset of new scientific and technological events (beneficial and detrimental) that are highly likely to emerge in coming years, the likely timing of their emergence, and how we might best guide their development. In addition, we seek to better characterize the physical mechanisms and efficiencies that underlie the accelerating development of technology in special domains. See our brief comparison of WFS and ASF as futures organizations.

Finally, we engage in selective advocacy for increasing scientific and technological literacy and foresight, technological research, innovation, diffusion and assessment, economic interdependence, sustainability, responsible globalization, social unity, transparency, balance, respect, self-empowerment, accelerating compassion, and other scientific, technological, business and humanist priorities in guiding technology's apparently unstoppable acceleration.

History

In 1999, John Smart started SingularityWatch.com (renamed AccelerationWatch.com in 2005) perhaps the first website devoted to multidisciplinary discussion of the accelerating pace of planetary change. In April 2003, a group of eight futurists in this community formed the Institute for Accelerating Change, renamed later that year to Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change. In 2005 we received a small initial endowment and changed our name to the Acceleration Studies Foundation. During this time our community has grown to 3,100 acceleration-aware readers who receive our monthly newsletter, Accelerating Times. We also have free monthly future salon meetings in twelve U.S. cities, and one in the online virtual world, Second Life. When in any of our host cities please drop by for discussion and dinner with fellow future-oriented thinkers.

Thank you for your interest in the Foundation. We hope you will join our growing community. If you wish to become further involved, here are suggestions for some things you can do.

Outreach | Education | Research | Advocacy