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Change Leaders Directory

Technology and Innovation
Including: Developing and improving our tools and infrastructure of accelerating change. Engineering intelligence amplification (I.A.) and artificial/autonomous intelligence (A.I.). Information, communications, energy, transportation, and other technologies and the innovation processes surrounding them.

These distinguished thought- and change-leaders are not affiliated with ASF, but where we have contact information, they are all formally invited to attend our annual conference, Accelerating Change. Others to suggest? Please let us know. Potential candidates should have published work that deals uniquely, incisively and pragmatically with some scientific, technological, business, or social dimension of accelerating change.

Female and underrepresented minority leaders are listed in green, and international leaders in orange. Accompanying each individual's entry are sample publications, and occasional ASF comments regarding topics of interest for future Accelerating Change or Acceleration Studies conferences. Each leader has been categorized on the basis of our subjective assessment, from a small sample of their work. All may contact us to edit, recategorize, multiply categorize, or delist their entries at any time.

Chris Adami (Open Problems in Artificial Life, 2000)
Richard Albright,
Technology Roadmapping Scholar, Albright Strategy Group.
Clark Aldrich, Simulations and the Future of Learning, 2003; SimuLearn's Virtual Leader.
            Training the modern workforce through e-Learning simulations.
James Bailey (After Thought, 1996)
William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation. Homepage. Workpage.
            The Future of Religion, 1986; Societal Implications of Nanoscience & Nanotechnology, 2002;
            Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, 2002
            Personality capture and NBIC convergence trends
Peter Bentley, Senior Research Fellow, University College, London, UNITED KINGDOM. Workpage.
            Evolutionary Design By Computers, 1999; Creative Evolutionary Systems, 2001; Digital Biology, 2002;
            On Growth, Form, and Computers, 2003
            Merging evolutionary processes, developmental biology and computer science.
Sergey Brin, Google
            Managing large data sets in world of accelerating information
Comment: Moore's law has driven a continued exponential growth of general and scientific data (but not published scientific papers, which are saturating) in recent decades. For a long time now, we haven't been able to adequately navigate this exploding datacosm. There have been new interfaces, but some, such as 3D visualization, have been less valuable than pundits expected. The flood of new data in genomics and proteomics is also providing new processing and conceptual challenges. But the rapid growth of scientific, governmental and corporate databases and the web itself are producing quantities of data that challenge the limits of our best computers. New processing platforms, distributed computing, grid computing, agent systems, and superscalar simulation techniques are emerging, but our ability to generate data permanently outruns our ability to process and digest it, creating new economic opportunities.
George Bugliarello, Chancellor, Polytechnic U. Homepage.
            "The Biosoma: Synthesis of Biology, Machines, and Society", 2000
            "Reflections on Technological Literacy," 2000
James Burke, UNITED KINGDOM, Connections, 1980; The Day the Universe Changed, 1995; The Pinball Effect, 1997; The Knowledge Web, 1999; Circles, 2000
            Technological innovation, diffusion, and assessment: patterns and prospects
Dennis Bushnell,
Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center.
            Security threats from the rising power of individual asymmetric destruction; Technology roadmapping; Web-based education
Nick Carr,
Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, 2004
           
The commoditization of many forms of IT and its long-term leveling influence on competition.
Jim Clark,
Chairman, World Technology Network. Annual World Technology Summit. Broad coverage of emerging technologies.
Jos De Mul
, Professor of Philosophy, Erasmus U, NETHERLANDS
            The Nature of Transhumanism
Eric Drexler, Foresight.org. Homepage.
            Nanosystems, 1992
            Engines of Creation, 1986
Karen Falkenberg, Member, NAE/NRC Committee on Technology Literacy
            Challenges in evaluating technological acceleration
Christine Finn, Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley
Quotation: "Without a sense of the past, there is a danger of raising a generation of change-junkies, weaned on the rush of accelerating technologies, for whom history has no relevance. They would recognise technological change only through its material culture—the stuff—brought to them on the street and in a welter of media hits. In their world where nothing stands still, they are left with no space to evaluate why technological change happens and, crucially, its implications." (more)
Steve Grand, Creature Labs. Homepage. Creation, 2001
           
Simulation
Fred Hapgood,
Technology writer. Homepage. IT; virtual reality; underground urban development; policy
Jeff Harrow,
The Harrow Group, Editor, The Harrow Report (Formerly: Rapidly Changing Face of Computing)
Danny Hillis (The Connection Machine, 1989; Pattern on the Stone, 1999 )
            Computation; Singularity mechanisms and scenarios; The "Long Now" perspective.
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia
Comment: Nvidia, and other leading graphics processor developers, in building the 'visual cortex technemes' of the coming substrate, has been doubling its GPU transistor densities on a six to nine month timescale in recent years, two times shorter than Moore's Law (Wired 10.07, p. 102). Is this an unsustainable burst, prior to commodification of these chips, or is it a persistent and scalable new developmental standard?
Bart Kosko, Electrical Engineer, USC. Homepage.
            Fuzzy Thinking, 1993; Fuzzy Future/Heaven in a Chip, 2000
Ray Kurzweil, AI Developer, KurzweilAI.net
            The Age of Intelligent Machines, 1992
            The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999
            "The Singularity is Near", 2001
            Double exponential growth, future of computation
Mark Madou, Microfabrication: The Science of Miniaturization, 2002
Patti Maes, Constructing Intelligent Agents, MIT
Scott Mize, AngstroVision. Advisory Chairman, Nanotech Opportunity Report. Homepage.
            The practical applications of near term nanotechnology.
Hans Moravec, Computer Scientist, CMU
          
  Robot, 1999
           
Mind Children, 1988
            Scenarios for robotic and machine intelligence; Computional learning paradigms
Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think, 1981, The Fifth Generation, 1983,
            The Universal Machine, 1985, Rise of the Expert Company, 1990,
            The Futures of Women
, 1997
Theodore Modis
(SWITZERLAND), Predictions, 1992; Predictions: 10 Years Later, 2002
            Forecasting the Growth of Complexity and Change, Tech. Forecasting & Social Change, 69, No 4, 2002.
            Acceleration contrarian: "Global technological inflection point circa 1990."
Patricia Moody (and Dick Morley)
The Technology Machine: Manufacturing in 2020, 1999
Doug Mulhall,
Our Molecular Future, 2002. Nanotech and Ecology.
Cherry Murray, Lucent. Bell Labs Senior VP of Physical Sciences Research
            Enhancement of group communication, efficiency, and creativity
Nils Nilsson
            Emeritus Prof. of Engineering, Robotics Laboratory, Stanford University
            Teleo-Reactive Robotics, Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis, 1998
Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies, 1984/99; Disasters Evermore?, 2007
            Distributed systems, redundancy, and better government regulation and oversight to minimize natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters.
Mark Pesce
            The Playful World, 2000; VRML and virtual reality. Nanoenvironmental debate.
Ian Pearson, BT Exact Technologies (ENGLAND)
Christine Peterson, Foresight.org. Homepage. Unbounding the Future, 1993
            Nanotechnological accelerations
Rosalind Picard, Affective Computing, 2000
Diane Piepol, Producer, USC Institute for Creative Technologies
            FlatWorld project: The race to digitally simulate reality.
Richard Rhodes
            (Dark Sun, 1995) "The Nuclear Singularity." Unusable weapons and the future of war.
Mihail Roco, NBIC Convergence Conference
            Nanotech, biotech, infotech, and cognitive science: convergence technologies
Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
Comment: Schmidt calculates that IT bandwidth has been doubling every 12 months. (George Gilder originally proposed six months, "Gilder's Law."). Schmidt's estimate was seconded by Probe Research in a study of internet traffic 1997-2002. That Gilder's revised law of bandwidth (12 months), like Poor's law (node density doubling), is still hyperexponential vs. conventional Moore's law. Other scholars (Brad De Long, 2002) have proposed that IT bandwidth grows more slowly than processor power, which grows more slowly than storage capacity.
John Sculley, Former CEO, Apple Computer
            "In the near future, quantum microelectronics promises to increase information processing capabilities by a factor of a billion…"
Bob Schaller, Professor of Business, College of Southern Maryland
           
Ph.D.: The Origins, Nature, and Implications of Moore's Law, 1996 Homepage. Workpage.
Larry Smarr, California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology
Fred Stitt, San Francisco Institute of Architecture
            Community space in an increasingly intelligent world
Ilkka Tuomi, FINLAND/SPAIN. Bio. "The Lives and Death of Moore's Law," 2002.
Sherry Turkle,
Life on theScreen, The Second Self (Cyberspace, MIT)
Nadejda Victor, Program for Human Environment, Rockefeller University
            Author, "DRAMs as Model Organisms for the Study of Technological Evolution." Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 69 (2002).
Vernor Vinge, Mathematician, SDSU (Ret.); Science Fiction Author
            "The Coming Technological Singularity," 1993
            Singularity mechanisms, metrics, and scenarios
Peter Voss
            Design approaches to the technological singularity; Theories of general intelligence
Daniel Weld (First Law of Robotics, AAAI Safe Learning Agents Section Chairs)
            Strategies for safe learning agents
Eliezer Yudkowsky
            Technological singularity mechanisms and scenarios; Engineered "friendliness."

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