Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology and life extension. She is Co-Founder and Past President of Foresight Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. Foresight educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects.
She serves on the Advisory Board of theĀ Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and has served on California’sĀ Blue Ribbon Task Force on NanotechnologyĀ and the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA’sĀ Nanotech Briefs.
She has often directedĀ Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, organizedĀ Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes, and chairedĀ Foresight Vision Weekends.
She lectures on nanotechnology to a wide variety of audiences, focusing on making this complex field understandable, and on clarifying the difference between near-term commercial advances and the “Next Industrial Revolution” arriving in the next few decades.
Her work is motivated by a desire to help Earth’s environment and traditional human communities avoid harm and instead benefit from expected dramatic advances in technology. This goal of spreading benefits led to an interest in new varieties of intellectual property includingĀ open source software, a term she is credited with originating.
Wearing her for-profit hat, she chairs the Personalized Life Extension Conference series. In 1991 she coauthoredĀ Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology RevolutionĀ (Morrow,Ā full text online), which sketches nanotechnology’s potential environmental and medical benefits as well as possible abuses. An interest in group process led to coauthoringĀ Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to WorkĀ (knOwhere Press, 1997,Ā full text online) with Gayle Pergamit.
Peterson holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from MIT.
Past lectures:Ā RecentĀ orĀ Earlier
VideoĀ of keynote at O’Reilly Open Source Convention
VideoĀ of Chairman’s Intro from Personalized Life Extension Conference (22 min)
Christine Peterson
Foresight Institute
PO Box 61058
Palo Alto, CA 94306 USA
tel +1 (650) 289 0860
fax +1 (650) 289 0863
emailĀ 
