How ASF Benefits You
Projects
1. Keynotes, Talks, Seminars, Workshops, and Consulting.
See our Services
page for these. Services are run by ASF President John
Smart, and ASF's consulting arm, Acceleration Associates.
2. Salons. We run the Future
Salon Network, a community of monthly gatherings in Los Angeles,
Palo Alto, Las Vegas, San Diego, Seattle, Washington DC, and in
the online digital world Second Life. Future Salons explore
ways to better understand, manage and profit from accelerating
changes in science, technology, business, policy, and society.
These are educational, social, and resource events for local communities.
Let us know if you'd like to start a salon in your area.
3. Knowledge Base. ASF websites, Accelerating.org,
EvoDevoUniverse.com, our Global Foresight Wiki, and our online Foresight Guide,
provide links to online communities and leaders in technology and societal
foresight, assessment, and policy.
4. Personal Foresight. We run
monthly and annual Fusion retreats
that promote individual foresight, goal-setting and life process
actualization in small group environments.
5. Undergraduate Courses. We have developed
a course in Foresight Development, taught at the University
of Advancing Technology, an innovative private university
in Tempe, AZ educating the IT-enabled generation. This course
helps UAT students to think about global, career, and personal
futures, and take actionable steps to improve their day-to-day
foresight and planning.
6. Conference. We produce Accelerating
Change, ASF's occasional conference exploring accelerating
technological change from a multidisciplinary perspective.
7. Newsletter. We publish Accelerating
Times, free e-news about accelerating positive changes,
choices and challenges in technology development.
Navigating
the Future
Accelerating information and communication technologies
are the most dynamic complexity construction systems in the known
universe. Faced with the prospect of further profound acceleration
in their capacity, many strategists today either deny this possibility,
or ignore the historical record entirely. We believe that the evidence
is strongly against the first response, and the second response
is unwise. A third path must be taken.
Archimedes said: "Give me a lever long
enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world." It
is clear that the lever we have been given for this phase of human
existence is accelerating technological change, and the types of
world-moving we wish to do are in our hands. Let us choose wisely.
Human beings are today participating in the development
of increasingly intelligent, interdependent, resilient, self-directing,
and resource efficient global social-technological systems. The
more clearly we see and understand this subtle and profound process,
the better we can create and choose paths that safely and substantially
improve the human condition.
Marcel Proust said, "The real
voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but
in having new eyes." Since the birth of civilization, humanity
has been learning to build special types of technological systems
that are able to progressively do more for us, in a more networked
and resilient fashion, using less resources (matter, energy, space,
time, human and economic capital) to deliver any fixed amount of
complexity, productivity, or capability.
We are faced daily with many possible evolutionary
choices in which to invest our precious time, energy, and resources.
The more carefully we look, the more easily we can see not only
evolutionary possibility, but also optimal developmental pathways
that will clearly "do more, better, with less."
ASF, through community dialog and research, seeks to help us better
manage evolutionary uncertainty while identifying those most-desirable
developmental choices, consistent with naturally accelerating local
and universal processes, so that we can benefit from this foresight
today.
ASF's primary goal is to promote better observation,
measurement, understanding and guidance of the accelerating intelligence,
interdependence, resiliency, autonomy, and efficiencies that are
constantly occurring in our increasingly technological world. With
better social foresight, we may distinguish those kinds of accelerations
that are continually advancing (e.g., computation, technological
efficiency, economic productivity) from those that are more periodic
in nature (e.g., market valuations, political and social cycles,
the rise and fall of specific technologies and business models).
We seek to better differentiate the sociotechnological choices we
prefer (productivity, connectivity, diversity, competition, increased
choice, compassion, security) from those we would avoid (destabilization,
discrimination, cultural homogenization, nonsustainability).
We seek to help individuals and organizations to better
monitor external acceleration (environmental scanning, competitive
intelligence) and build internal resilience/robustness to generalized
accelerating change in a variety of domains. We wish to help our
community discover, in a range of contexts, the appropriate balance
between centralization and decentralization, control vs. choice,
make vs. buy, insourcing vs. outsourcing, and other perennial management
issues.
Our foundation connects you with insightful professionals,
diverse skill sets, and concise and relevant resources to help you
understand and manage our accelerating world. We seek to substantially
improve our big picture scientific understanding, general technological
foresight, business acumen, and social wisdom, as we learn to see
existing technologies, markets, politicolegal frameworks and cultural
phenomena "with new eyes." Ideally, we will use these
insights to guide increasingly powerful personal, institutional,
and global change for the rest of our careers. Welcome.
Planned
Projects
A list of projects in various stages of planning follows.
Would you like to help us with this work? Please email
us if you would like to discuss a tax-deductible contribution
(to either our endowment or operating fund), services, publicity,
or other support you might be able to volunteer. Feedback? Contact
us at johnsmart{at}gmail.com.
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