David Ewing Duncan is an American journalist, author, researcher and convener, who inspires audiences to imagine the near-limitless possibilities of technologies ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) systems to synthetic biology that are on the cusp of profoundly impacting humanity, for better or for worse.
Background
David E. Duncan was born in 1958 in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Lake Quivira, Kansas. His father, Herbert Ewing Duncan, Jr., is an award-winning architect. His mother is the artist, photographer, and environmental activist Patricia DuBose Duncan.
Education
Duncan graduated from Vassar College.
Career
David Duncan writes for Wired, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and Technology Review. He recently wrote a regular column for the Daily Beast. He is a former Contributing Editor to Wired, Discover, Condé Nast Portfolio and Technology Review; he also has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic, Fortune, Newsweek, Life, Outside, and Harper's, among many others. Duncan was a longtime commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition and was Chief Correspondent on public radio's "Biotech Nation," part of "Tech Nation," broadcast weekly out of KQED in San Francisco and heard in 133 countries.
His most recent book is Talking to Robots: Tales from Our Human-Robot Futures; Duncan considers 24 visions of possible human-robot futures - Incredible scenarios from Teddy Bots to Warrior Bots, and Politician Bots to Sex Bots - Grounded in real technologies and possibilities and inspired by our imagination.
Other books include When I'm 164: The new science of radical life extension, and what happens if it succeeds (TED Books), Masterminds: Genius, DNA and The Quest to Rewrite Life (Harper-Collins) and Residents: The perils and promise of educating young doctors (Scribner). He also wrote the international bestseller Calendar: Humanity's epic struggle to determine a true and accurate year (Avon), a bestseller in 14 countries.
In television, he was a special producer and correspondent for ABC Nightline, and a special producer for ABC’s 20/20. He was a correspondent for NOVA’s Science Now, and a documentary co-producer for the Discovery Channel.
Duncan also is a frequent speaker, and appears often in the media, including on the Today Show and NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition.
Duncan was the founding director of the Center for Life Science Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the founder and former director of The BioAgenda Institute for Life Science Policy, a San Francisco-based nonprofit think-tank that held summits, panels and discussions, and sponsored white papers on important issues in the life sciences between 2003 and 2007.
In 2011, he launched The Personalized Health Project, sponsored by The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
He is the co-founder and Curator of Arc Fusion, which holds events around the world for leaders and thinkers on the "fusion" of health, IT, and biomedicine, and on the future of humans. Since 2014, Arc Fusion has held over 25 events in 9 cities in Europe and North America on issues ranging from AI and Health and the Future of Humans to the Cost of Healthcare and the Opioid Epidemic. He recently was a Health Strategist-in-Residence for IDEO.
Currently, Duncan lives in San Francisco, California and regularly lectures at Singularity University.
Membership
David Duncan is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a workspace co-operative that also includes Po Bronson, Caroline Paul, and Tom Barbash, among others. He also has served on a special communications committee at the National Academies of Science.