John M. Smart is an evolutionary developmental systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on accelerating change, computational autonomy (human-independent machine learning) and technology foresight. He is professor and program champion for the M.S. program in Emerging Technology at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT.edu, Phoenix, AZ), and directs the Acceleration Studies Foundation (Mountain View, CA) a nonprofit technology and social foresight research organization. He is an affiliate of the ECCO research group at VUB, and a co-founder of the Evo Devo Universe research community, an international community of scholars exploring evolutionary and developmental processes of change at the universal and subsystem scales. His personal website (since 1999) on accelerating technological change is AccelerationWatch.com.
John has a B.S. in business administration from UC 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 undergraduate work 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.