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Long Now Board & Friends

Long Conversation 02020

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Recorded live on Apr 14, 02020

at Livestream

Long Now's first mass virtual event of the 02020 COVID-19 Pandemic brought together Long Now Board Members and invited speakers for a virtual Long Conversation to reflect on the current moment, how it fits into our deeper future, and how we can address threats to civilization that are rare but ultimately predictable.

Long Conversation is a relay conversation of 20 minute one-to-one conversations; each speaker has an un-scripted conversation with the speaker before them, and then speaks with the next participant before they themselves rotate off. This relay conversation format was first presented under the auspices of Artangel in London at a Longplayer performance in 02009.

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bio

Honored as Inc. magazine’s 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year, Ping Fu describes herself as an artist and a scientist whose chosen expression is business. In 01997, Ping co-founded Geomagic, a 3D imaging software company, which was acquired by 3D Systems in February 02013. The 3D technologies they developed were created to fundamentally change the way products are designed and manufactured around the world. Used for everything from repairing vintage cars at Jay Leno’s garage to digitally recreating the Statue of Liberty, Geomagic software enables design and production of one-of-a-kind products and services at a cost less than that of mass production.

Before co-founding Geomagic, Ping Fu was program manager of visualization at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she was part of the team that initiated and managed the NCSA Mosaic software project that led to Netscape and Internet Explorer. She has more than 20 years of software industry experience in database, networking, geometry processing and computer graphics

Ping is actively involved in promoting entrepreneurship and women in mathematics and sciences. Since 2010, Ping has been serving on the NACIE (National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship) at the Department of Commerce and she is an active supporter of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is the author of the business book Bend, Not Break, and holder of five U.S. and international patents.

Ping has received numerous awards for her leadership as an entrepreneur, including the Outstanding American by Choice award from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Carolinas, the Women’s Leadership Exchange Compass Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award by Business Leader magazine. In addition, she was a guest of First Lady Michelle Obama for the President’s 2010 State of Union address. Ping was also one of delegates from the U.S. Department of State at APEC 2011 and contributed to the September 16, 2011, San Francisco Declaration.

Ping received a Master of Science in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from University of California, San Diego.

Ramez Naam holds a number of patents in technology and artificial intelligence and was involved in key product development at Microsoft. He was also CEO of Apex Nanotechnologies. His books include the Nexus trilogy of science fiction thrillers, and in non-fiction: The Infinite Resource : The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet and More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement.

Following a quarter century of leadership of The Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose continues his work on 10,000-year clock and his research to discover the stories and lessons behind the world’s longest-lived organizations.

Alexander is an industrial designer and has been working with The Long Now Foundation and computer scientist Danny Hillis since 01997 to build a monument scale, all mechanical 10,000-year clock. Alexander speaks about the work of The Long Now Foundation all over the world at venues ranging from TEDå to corporations and government agencies.

As the director of Long Now, Alexander founded The Interval, The Organizational Continuity Project, and has facilitated a range of projects including The Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Alexander shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the first prototype of which is in the Science Museum of London, and the monument scale version is now under construction in West Texas. Alexander is also an advisor to the METI project.

Alexander graduated with a bachelor of arts honors degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Industrial Design in 01995, as well as attended the Art Center College of Design. He was an artist in residence at Silicon Graphics Inc., and a founding partner of the robotics company Inertia Labs.

Alexander's combat robots have won over six world championship titles appearing in the hit TV show BattleBots. He has built large pyrotechnic displays for the Burning Man festival, robotic bartenders and other dangerous machines. Alexander was a world champion paintball player holding multiple world titles with his team the Ironmen from 1990 through 1995. At Carnegie Mellon University Alexander was the lead designer for a record setting human powered vehicle team.

Alexander lives in California in Marin County and enjoys mountain biking, mountaineering and other back country activities whenever he can get out.

Speaking engagements

Writing and media appearances

Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. Before joining the Globe , she served as a senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House, was the director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and taught in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her book, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age was published in September 02019.

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 02005 to 02009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is the author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.

Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards and author of 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week published by Simon & Schuster. Tiffany’s films and work have received over 80 awards and distinctions including being selected for the Albert Einstein Foundation Genius:100 Visions of the Future. NPR names her UCBerkeley address on it’s list of best commencement speeches and her films have premiered at top festivals including Sundance. She lectures worldwide on the relationship between technology and humanity.

Peter Schwartz is the Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning for Salesforce.com. Prior to that, Peter co-founded Global Business Network, a leader in scenario planning in 01988, where he served as chairman until 02011. From 01982 to 01986, Peter headed scenario planning for the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies in London. His team conducted comprehensive analyses of the global business and political environment and worked with senior management to create successful strategies. Before joining Royal Dutch/Shell, Peter directed the Strategic Environment Center at SRI International. The Center researched the business milieu, lifestyles, and consumer values, and conducted scenario planning for corporate and government clients.

Schwartz is the co-author of both the 01999 books The Long Boom, and When Good Companies Do Bad Things: Responsibility and Risk in an Age of Globalization, and is the author of the 01991 book, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World. This seminal publication on scenario planning has been translated into Dutch, Portuguese, and Chinese. Peter also co-authored "Seven Tomorrows: Toward a Voluntary History" with James Ogilvy and Paul Hawken in 01982, and "The Emergent Paradigm: Changing Patterns of Thought and Belie" with James Ogilvy in 01979. He has published and lectured widely and served as a script consultant on the films War Games and Sneakers. He received a BS in aeronautical engineering and astronautics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The Schwartz Energy Blog can be read here.

Paul Saffo is a forecaster who studies the dynamics of large-scale, long-term technological change. He is co-editor of the 4th edition of Futures Research Methodology Handbook, a comprehensive reference work recognized as the single most authoritative source in the futures research field. Formerly an Adjunct Professor at Stanford, Paul is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Paul holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University.

W. Daniel ("Danny") Hillis is the co-founder of Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists and artists that develop technology solutions in partnership with leading companies and entrepreneurs. He is also the co-founder of Applied Minds, visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab, the Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), professor of research medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, and research professor of engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering. Previously, he was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and Disney Fellow, where he developed new technologies and business strategies for Disney's theme parks, television, motion pictures, Internet and consumer products businesses. He is the winner of many awards, including the Dan David Prize.

An inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and visionary, Hillis pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds hundreds of U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, touch interfaces, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices.

As a student at MIT, Hillis began to study the physical limitations of computation and the possibility of building highly parallel computers. This work led to the design of a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors in 1985, called the Connection Machine. During this period at MIT, Hillis cofounded Thinking Machines Corp. to produce and market parallel computers. In addition to designing the company's major products, Hillis worked closely with his customers in applying parallel computers to problems in astrophysics, aircraft design, financial analysis, genetics, computer graphics, medical imaging, image understanding, neurobiology, materials science, cryptography and subatomic physics. At Thinking Machines, he built a legendary team of scientists, designers and engineers who later became leaders and innovators in multiple industries.

In 2005, Hillis and others from Applied Minds initiated Metaweb Technologies to develop a semantic data storage infrastructure for the Internet, and Freebase, an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". That company was acquired by Google and became the basis of the Google Knowledge Graph.

W. Daniel ("Danny") Hillis is the co-founder of Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists and artists that develop technology solutions in partnership with leading companies and entrepreneurs. He is also the co-founder of Applied Minds, visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab, the Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), professor of research medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, and research professor of engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering. Previously, he was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and Disney Fellow, where he developed new technologies and business strategies for Disney's theme parks, television, motion pictures, Internet and consumer products businesses. He is the winner of many awards, including the Dan David Prize.

An inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and visionary, Hillis pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds hundreds of U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, touch interfaces, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices.

As a student at MIT, Hillis began to study the physical limitations of computation and the possibility of building highly parallel computers. This work led to the design of a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors in 1985, called the Connection Machine. During this period at MIT, Hillis cofounded Thinking Machines Corp. to produce and market parallel computers. In addition to designing the company's major products, Hillis worked closely with his customers in applying parallel computers to problems in astrophysics, aircraft design, financial analysis, genetics, computer graphics, medical imaging, image understanding, neurobiology, materials science, cryptography and subatomic physics. At Thinking Machines, he built a legendary team of scientists, designers and engineers who later became leaders and innovators in multiple industries.

Hillis has published scientific papers in journals such as Science, Nature, Modern Biology, Communications of the ACM, and International Journal of Theoretical Physics and has been an editor of several scientific journals, including Artificial Life, Complexity, Complex Systems, and Applied Mathematics. He has also written extensively on technology for publications such as Newsweek, Wired, and Scientific American. He is the author of two books, Connection Machine and The Pattern on the Stone. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the International Leadership Forum, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is co-founder & co-chair of The Long Now Foundation and the designer of the 10,000 year mechanical clock.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired, a magazine he helped launch in 01993. He served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 01999. From 01984 - 01990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 01985. Kelly edited, published, and wrote much of Signal, a pre-Wired compendium of digital tools. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, a blueprint for the emerging digital economy, and wrote the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. His newest book is called What Technology Wants, due out in the Fall 02010. He is also editor and publisher of several very popular websites including Cool Tools, True Films, and the Quantified Self.

Kevin Kelly's writing has appeared in many national and international publications such as the New York Times, The Economist, Time, The Smithsonian, Harpers, Science, GQ, Wall Street Journal and Esquire. Before taking up the consequences of technology, Kelly was a nomadic photojournalist. One summer he rode a bicycle 5,000 miles across America. For most of the 01970's he was a photographer in remote parts of Asia, publishing his photographs in national magazines. His photographs have appeared in LIFE and other national magazines. In 02001 he co-founded a scientific initiative called the All Species Inventory to discover and describe all the living species on Earth. That project eventually became the Encyclopedia of Life.

Esther Dyson has devoted her life to discovering the inevitable and promoting the possible. As an investor/commentator, she focuses on emerging technologies and business models, emerging markets and emerging companies. In 1994, she was one of the first to explore the impact of the Net on intellectual property in her own (paid-subscription) newsletter Release 1.0 and in Wired. In 1997, she wrote a book on the impact of the Net on individuals' lives, Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age.

Dyson does business as chairman of EDventure Holdings, the reclaimed name of the company she sold to CNET in 2004. She spends most of her time interfering with the companies listed below, most of them start-ups.

In addition, she donates time and money as a trustee to emerging organizations (the Santa Fe Institute, the Sunlight Foundation, StopBadware.org and the Eurasia Foundation). From 1998 to 2000, she was founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international agency charged with setting policy for the Internet's core infrastructure (technical standards and the Domain Name System) independent of government control. She also sits on the Russian government's commission to establish a Russian Silicon Valley, to which she contributes both enthusiasm and skepticism.

After graduating from Harvard in economics, Dyson began her serious education in 1974 as a fact-checker for Forbes and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977 she joined New Court Securities as "the research department", following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research and in 1983 bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, and renamed it EDventure Holdings.

The daughter of an English physicist and a Swiss mathematician, Dyson started traveling in Eastern Europe in 1989 and eventually helped to fill the small but vital vacuum at the intersection of Eastern Europe, high-tech and venture capital...and space travel. From October 2008 to March 2009, she lived in Russia's Star City training as a cosmonaut.

Esther's portfolio of active investments (board seats on the ones starred) includes:

Katherine Fulton has spent her life deliberately confronting social change —learning from the past, adapting to the present, and scouting the future. In her diverse roles as a journalist, teacher, organizational leader, trusted advisor, and civic volunteer, she aspires to be a change agent who enlarges the possibilities that groups and leaders embrace while grounding action in rigor and reality.

In recent years, Katherine has become well-known as an expert on the rapidly shifting terrain of philanthropy and impact investing. She has worked closely with many of the early 21st century’s generation’s leading philanthropists, major foundations and rising social entrepreneurs, always aiming for greater clarity and foresight aligned with creativity and courage. She has also authored many publications on the future of philanthropy, served on numerous governing boards and given dozens of major speeches, including at Long Now and at TED.

Katherine’s work draws upon her own life experiences of change, healing, and transformation. A native Virginian, she learned the importance of philanthropy and community service through the example of her family’s leadership. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in history and literature, Katherine began her career back in the South, where she covered politics for a major daily newspaper. Later she co-founded The North Carolina Independent, an award-winning investigative newspaper, which won her both a foundation prize for community service and a year of study as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. After leaving journalism in the early 01990s, she taught at Duke University before moving to California to work side-by-side with leaders at Global Business Network (GBN). There she learned from world-class futurists, mastered the scenario planning toolkit and focused on provoking journalistic institutions to adapt to the rapidly shifting technological context. As GBN merged twice (into Monitor Group and then Deloitte Consulting), Katherine spent more than a decade building a leading social sector consulting practice as president of Monitor Institute. This innovative social enterprise, hosted and supported by the parent firms, applies world-class consulting tools, hard-won knowledge and talent to major social and environmental challenges.

Katherine lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her long-time spouse, Katharine Kunst, where they have put down roots in the wine country. While co-chairing Long Now and helping lead its generational transition, she founded an innovative local philanthropy fund in the pandemic that continues to pioneer new ways for donors to join together to do what they cannot do alone. In a new and perilous time, she is devoted to working with leaders across generations to plant the seeds of a better long-term future while reducing suffering today.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford, an internationally bestselling author, and the writer & presenter of the PBS series The Brain. He studies time perception, sensory substitution, synesthesia, and neurolaw, and has 3 startups that have spun out of his laboratory. Eagleman is a Long Now board member. His scientific publications appear in Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron, and he serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals.

Dr. Eagleman has written several neuroscience books, including the New York Times bestseller Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, and the upcoming Live Wired: The Dynamically Reorganizing Brain.

Eagleman has also written an internationally bestselling book of literary fiction, Sum, which has been translated into 27 languages and was named a Best Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble, New Scientist, and the Chicago Tribune. Eagleman and Brian Eno recently performed a musical reading of Sum at the Sydney Opera House, and Eagleman has teamed with German composer Max Richter to translate Sum into an 02012 opera at the Royal Opera House in London.

Dr. Eagleman has written for the New York Times, Discover Magazine, Atlantic, Slate, Wired and New Scientist, and he appears regularly on National Public Radio and BBC to discuss both science and literature.

Stewart Brand is cofounder of The Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network. He created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog (National Book Award), and co-founded the Hackers Conference and The WELL. His books include The Clock of the Long Now; How Buildings Learn; and The Media Lab. His most recent book, titled Whole Earth Discipline, is published by Viking in the US and Atlantic in the UK. He graduated in Biology from Stanford and served as an Infantry officer.

His homepage is here.

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