Piero Scaruffi

Piero Scaruffi graduated in Mathematics (summa cum laude) in 1982 from University of Turin, where he did work on relativity and on quarks under Tullio Regge. His thesis was about a string theory of vortices. For a number of years (1985-91) he was the founding director of the Artificial Intelligence Center at Olivetti, based in Cupertino, California, and later joined IntelliCorp, one of the earliest companies specializing in Artificial Intelligence. See old articles about his AI Center. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University and Stanford University conducting research on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, has lectured in three continents on "The Nature of Mind" and "History of Knowledge" (for many years at U.C. Berkeley), and has published a number of books as well as hundreds of articles for magazines both in Italy and the U.S. "Thinking About Thought" (2015 edition), in four volumes, is his most recent book on Cognitive Science. "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2015) is a book on Artificial Intelligence, the Singularity and the post-human condition. The readers for one of his U.C. Berkeley courses were compiled in the eBook "A Brief History of Knowledge" (2011).

As a software consultant, he pioneered Internet applications, Artificial Intelligence and Object-Orientated design in Silicon Valley. He also co-wrote a massive "History of Silicon Valley" (2012), that was later translated in Chinese (2014) and voted seventh most influential book of the year.

All along he has also continued writing poetry both in Italian and in English (for which he has been awarded several prizes). The book "Synthesis" (2009) collects poems and meditations.

He pioneered Internet-based journalism. In 1985 he created his first e-zine, distributed by e-mail over the Internet. Between 1986 and 1990 he created an online database, downloadable via ftp. That database mutated into his own website in 1995, one of the first websites in the world to be named after the person writing it: www.scaruffi.com.

On 15 Oct 2006 the New York Times ran an article about Piero's website www.scaruffi.com titled "The Greatest Website of all Time".
In July 2017 the Telegraph listed scaruffi.com as "the oldest webpage that is still being updated".

He is probably more famous on the Web as a critic and historian of rock, jazz and avantgarde music. His main books on music are: "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009), "A History of Jazz Music 1900-2000" (2007), "A History of Popular Music before Rock Music" (2007), and a guide to avantgarde music (out of print and being revised on the website). He also writes regularly about cinema, literature, science and history.

In 2012 he published three ebooks on the Visual Arts: "A Visual History of the Visual Arts - Part 1: From Impressionism to Surrealism" and "A Visual History of the Visual Arts - Part 2: From Abstract Art to Conceptual Art"; which were followed by "A Visual History of the Visual Arts - Part 3: The Age of Globalization (2013).

He has organized several interdisciplinary cultural events in the Bay Area. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evenings (LASERs) https://www.leonardo.info/laser-talks in january 2008 under the aegis of Leonardo ISAST, a series that spread to more than 30 universities worldwide. By 2017 LASERs were being held at University of San Francisco, Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley (all three chaired by him in person), in Washington DC at the National Academy of Science, in London, Paris, Zurich, Toronto, Montreal, Brazil, Hong Kong, as well as at UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, in New York, Texas, Kansas, Seattle, etc. Stanford hosted an interdisciplinary panel with scientists, thinkers, innovators and artists that became the SMMMASH (Stanford Multimedia Multidisciplinary Meetings of the Arts, Sciences and Humanities) in 2012. In 2014 he founded the LAST (Life Art Science Tech) festival www.lastfestival.org, that has been staged in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Stanford Univ, at San Jose State University in 2017, and at SLAC National Laboratory in 2018. During the covid-19 pandemic, he started the L.A.S.T. Dialogues on the Zoom platform.

Four of his books have been translated in China. A three-volume update of the "History of Silicon Valley" came out in 2016. The Chinese translation of "Intelligence is not Artificial" came out in early 2017, followed by a book written directly in Chinese with Jinxia Niu titled "Humankind 2.0 - The Technologies of the Future". He has lectured extensively in China since 2015 (click here for more details).
In 2017 he worked on a project with the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, which is the subject of a new book collaboration with Niu titled "Peace Technology" (2019).

An avid traveler who spends months on the road, Piero had visited more than 160 countries of the world as of 2016. Pictures of his travels have been published by magazines and used by the BBC in its series "Waking the Dead".