John M. Smart, President, ASF

John Smart is a technology foresight scholar, speaker, educator, consultant, and a systems theorist in global processes of evolution, development, and accelerating change. He directs the Acceleration Studies Foundation (Mountain View, CA) a research and consultancy nonprofit focused on improving the understanding and management of accelerating technological change. He is also founder of FERN, the Foresight Education and Research Network, a professional association improving global foresight education, training, and careers.

As an educator, he is a a lecturer on leadership and technological change at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), and an advisor in foresight and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA).

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

As a systems theorist, John is 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).

His personal website is AccelerationWatch.com and his blog is EverSmarterWorld.com.

John has 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, and an M.S. in futures studies from the University of Houston, and has done additional nondegree studies in biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at U.C. San Diego, U.C.L.A., and U.C. Berkeley. He studied systems theory at UCSD under the mentorship of James Grier Miller (Living Systems, 1978), who mentored under process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Dr. Miller encouraged John to pursue multi-scale studies in evolution, development, and accelerating change starting from a systems perspective.

John's research interests include:

Analysis of accelerating technological, economic and social change
Technology forecasting and learning / experience / performance curves
Technology strategy, planning, roadmapping, and requirements analysis
Technology foresight, trends, scenarios, Delphi and expert polls
Technology innovation, diffusion, assessment, and policy studies
Entrepreneurship and new product and service development
Horizon scanning, competitive intelligence, weak signals/emerging issues
Information technology foresight, computational and process automation
Resource (space, time, energy, and matter) efficiency and density studies
Evolutionary and developmental systems analysis and foresight
Social and technological immune systems, security, and threat analysists

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