Theodore Modis | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Greek, Swiss |
Alma mater | Anatolia College Columbia University |
Known for | Expertise in S-Curve Criticism of the Technological Singularity |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics, forecasting, business consulting |
Institutions | CERN University of Geneva Digital Equipment Corporation Growth Dynamics |
Academic advisors | Jack Steinberger |
Theodore Modis (born August 11, 1943) is a strategic business analyst, futurist, physicist, and international consultant. He specializes in applying fundamental scientific concepts to predicting social phenomena. In particular, he uses the law of natural growth in competition as expressed by the logistic function or S-curve to forecast markets, product sales, primary-energy substitutions, the diffusion of technologies, and generally any process that grows in competition. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] He is a vehement critic of the concept of the Technological Singularity. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] He has suggested a simple mathematical relationship between Entropy and Complexity as the latter being the time derivative of the former. [11]
He currently lives in Lugano, Switzerland.
He went to Columbia University, New York, where he received a master's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in High Energy Physics, (sponsor J. Steinberger). His secondary education was in Greece at Anatolia College in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Modis carried out research in particle physics at Brookhaven National Laboratories and CERN before moving to work at Digital Equipment Corporation for more than a decade as the head of a management science consultants group. He has on occasion taught at Columbia University, the University of Geneva, Webster University, the European business schools INSEAD and IMD, and was a professor at DUXX Graduate School of Business Leadership in Monterrey, Mexico between 1998 and 2001. He has been in the advisory board of the international journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change since 1991. [12] He is also the founder of Growth Dynamics, [13] a Swiss-based organization specializing in business strategy, strategic forecasting and management consulting. [14]
He has published about one hundred articles in scientific and in business journals, as well as ten books: Predictions, Conquering Uncertainty, An S-Shaped Trail to Wall Street (treating the New York Stock Exchange as an ecosystem), Predictions: 10 Years Later, Bestseller Driven, Natural Laws in the Service of the Decision Maker, Decision-Making for a New World, An S-shaped Adventure: "Predictions" 20 Years Later, Fortune Favors the Bold: A Woman’s Odyssey through a Turbulent Century, [15] and Science with Street Value: A Physicist's Wanderings off the Beaten Track. [16] His books have appeared in a number of other languages; Predictions has been translated into German, Japanese, and Greek, and Conquering Uncertainty has been translated into Chinese Long Form, Chinese Short Form, Greek, and Dutch. Fortune Favors the Bold: A Woman’s Odyssey through a Turbulent Century has been translated into Greek and published under the title ΘΕΟΔΟΣΙΑ.
He has created two applications for iPhone/iPad, The S_Curve and Biorhythm_Science. Together with Vasco Almeida they created applications that forecast stock prices like species by treating the stock market as an ecosystem: Stock Fcsts and 2Stock Fcsts [23] for the iPhone and Stocks' Futures and 2Stocks' Future [24] for the iPad. [25]
Modis is the father of Yorgo Modis, the grandson of Theodoros Modis, [26] and nephew of Georgios Modis.
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Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I.J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
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Futures studies, futures research, futurism or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social and technological advancement, and other environmental trends; often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and work in the future. Predictive techniques, such as forecasting, can be applied, but contemporary futures studies scholars emphasize the importance of systematically exploring alternatives. In general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and an extension to the field of history. Futures studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to explore the possibility of future events and trends.
In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change.
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J. Doyne Farmer is an American complex systems scientist and entrepreneur with interests in chaos theory, complexity and econophysics. He is Baillie Gifford Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, where he is also Director of the Complexity Economics at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. Additionally he is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His current research is on complexity economics, focusing on systemic risk in financial markets and technological progress. During his career he has made important contributions to complex systems, chaos, artificial life, theoretical biology, time series forecasting and econophysics. He co-founded Prediction Company, one of the first companies to do fully automated quantitative trading. While a graduate student he led a group that called itself Eudaemonic Enterprises and built the first wearable digital computer, which was used to beat the game of roulette.
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Andrey Vitalievich Korotayev is a Russian anthropologist, economic historian, comparative political scientist, demographer and sociologist, with major contributions to world-systems theory, cross-cultural studies, Near Eastern history, Big History, and mathematical modelling of social and economic macrodynamics.
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Didier Sornette is a French researcher studying subjects including complex systems and risk management. He is Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and is also a professor of the Swiss Finance Institute, He was previously a Professor of Geophysics at UCLA, Los Angeles California (1996–2006) and a Research Professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (1981–2006).
Tessaleno Campos Devezas is a Brazilian-born Portuguese physicist, systems theorist, and materials scientist. He is best known for his contributions to the long waves theory in socioeconomic development, technological evolution, energy systems as well as world system analysis.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to futures studies:
Theodoros Modis was a Greek lumber merchant and scholar from Monastiri.