accelerating.org

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 communities and technologies of accelerating change. Specifically, we seek:

1. To promote a multidisciplinary and critical understanding of accelerating processes of planetary change, in service to better economic, political, social, professional and personal development.
2. To improve the methods individuals and organizations use to innovate, plan, profit from, and predict the future by advancing the disciplines of Acceleration Studies, Development Studies, Futures Studies, Technology Roadmapping, and Forecasting.
3. To broadly help individuals, organizations, business, and society to discover and create a future of "exponential promise".

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,
• roadmapping, forecasting, scenarios and other data-driven Research, and
• selected technological, economic, political and social Advocacy
with regard to accelerating processes of change.

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.