A writer and researcher from Belarus who studies political and social implications of technology. Morozov expresses skepticism about the popular view that the Internet is helping to democratize authoritarian regimes, arguing that it could also be a powerful tool for engaging in mass surveillance, political repression, and spreading nationalist and extremist propaganda.
A Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, the reversal test, and consequentialism. In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, and he is currently the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart’s Law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation.
By the mid-1960s, Brand became associated with author Ken Kesey and the “Merry Pranksters”. With his partner Zach Stewart, he produced the Trips Festival in San Francisco, an early effort involving rock music and light shows. This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 hippies attended, and Haight-Ashbury soon emerged as a community.[5] Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, known simply as J. C. R. or “Lick”, was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history.
He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. He did much to actually initiate this by funding research which led to much of it, including today’s canonical graphical user interface, and the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet.
He has been called “computing’s Johnny Appleseed”, for planting the seeds of computing in the digital age; Robert Taylor, founder of Xerox PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center, noted that “most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick’s vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all”.