About the Speaker

Madeline Ashby graduated from the first cohort of the M.Des. in Strategic Foresight and Innovation programme at OCADU in 2011. It was her second Masters degree. (Her first, in Interdisciplinary Studies, focused on cyborg theory, fan culture, and Japanese animation!) Since 2011, she has been a freelance consulting futurist specializing in scenario development and science fiction prototypes. That same year, she sold her first novel, vN: The First Machine Dynasty, to Angry Robot Books. It is now a trilogy of novels about self-replicating humanoid robots (who eat each other alive). She is also the author of Company Town from Tor Books, a cyber-noir novel which was a finalist in the 2017 CBC Books Canada Reads competition, and a contributor to How To Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange, with Scott Smith. She is a member of the AI Policy Futures Group at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, and the XPRIZE Sci-Fi Advisory Council. Her work has appeared in BoingBoing, Slate, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.

About Resilience In A Changing World

The near future is clarifying itself. Over the coming decades, life will change as we know it on planet Earth. From climate instability to culture change, plagues of misinformation to global pandemics, human society faces more threats than at any other time in our history. At the same time, humanity is newly equipped to adapt, with emerging tools like artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and social innovation that have the power to reverse the narrative of impending global disruption. The time is now for us to integrate these powerful new methods - to intentionally design a more Just and Resilient future together.

The Resilience In A Changing World series will invite speakers to speculate on how we get from here to there, from our current inflection point to habitable futures where both our people and planet thrive amidst increasing uncertainty and change.