Esther Dyson

05/06/2025 itdf

Summary

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing.

Dyson is also an angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. Dyson’s career now focuses on health and she continues to invest in health and technology startups.

Source: Wikipedia

OnAir Post: Esther Dyson

About

Biography

sther Dyson (born July 14, 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator, and philanthropist with a significant impact on the technology and internet landscape. Here’s a look at her key accomplishments and background:

Key Highlights:

  • Early Career: She began her career in journalism, working as a fact-checker and reporter for Forbes magazine. She then moved to Wall Street as a securities analyst, focusing on technology companies.
  • EDventure Holdings: From 1983 to 2006, Dyson headed EDventure Holdings, a company that published the influential newsletter Release 1.0, analyzing the PC and internet industries. She also ran the annual PC Forum, a leading industry conference.
  • Author: She wrote Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (1997), a widely read book exploring the societal impact of the internet.
  • ICANN Founder: Dyson was the founding chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 1998 to 2000, playing a crucial role in the early governance of the internet.
  • Angel Investor: She is an active angel investor in numerous technology and health-related startups, with notable investments in companies like 23andMe, Flickr, Meetup, and Yandex.
  • Wellville Founder: Currently, Dyson is the executive founder of Wellville, a non-profit project focused on improving health and well-being in communities across the US.
  • Backup Cosmonaut: Interestingly, she trained as a backup cosmonaut in Star City, Russia.
  • Board Memberships: She has served on the boards of numerous influential organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Long Now Foundation, and the Sunlight Foundation.

In Summary:

Esther Dyson has been a pivotal figure in understanding and shaping the digital age. Her early insights into the internet’s impact, her role in internet governance, and her continued investment in innovative ventures demonstrate her significant contributions to the technology and business worlds. More recently, she has directed her energy towards health and well-being initiatives.

Source: Gemini

Web Links

ITDF Essay, April 2025

We Must Train People to be Self-Aware, to Understand Their Own Motivations and to Understand that AIs’ Goals Are Those of the Organizations and Systems That Control Them

Source: ITDF Webpage

“The short answer is: The future depends on us. The slightly longer answer: The future depends on how we use AI and how well we equip the next generation to use it. I’d like to share here with you more specifics on this, excerpted from an essay I wrote for The Information:

“‘People worried about AI taking their jobs are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans.

AI can give individuals huge power and capacity that they can choose to use to empower others or to manipulate others. If we do it right, we will train children, all people, to be self-aware and to understand their own human motivations – most deeply, the need to be needed by other humans. They also need to understand the motivations of the people and the systems they interact with, many of which will be empowered and driven by AI that reflects the goals of the people and institutions and systems that control them. It’s as simple as that and as hard to accomplish as anything I can imagine.

  • We should automate routine tasks and use the money and time saved to allow humans to do more meaningful work, especially helping parents raise healthier, more engaged children.
  • We should know enough to manipulate ourselves and to resist manipulation by others.
  • ‘Front-line trainers are crucial to raising healthy, resilient, curious children who will grow into adults capable of loving others and overcoming challenges. There’s no formal curriculum for front-line trainers. Rather, it’s about training kids and the parents who raise them to do two fundamental things.
    • ‘Ensure that they develop the emotional security to think long-term rather than grasp at short-term solutions through drugs, food, social media, gambling or other harmful palliatives. (Perhaps the best working definition of addiction is “doing something now for short-term relief that you know you will regret later.”)
    • ‘Kids need to understand themselves and understand the motivations of the people, institutions and social media they interact with. That’s how to combat fake news or the distrust of real news. It is less about traditional media literacy and more about understanding: “Why am I seeing this news? Are they trying to get me angry or just using me to sell ads?” …

“‘Expecting and new parents are the ideal place to begin such training. They are generally eager for help and guidance, which used to come from their own parents and relatives, from schools and from religious leaders. Now such guidance is scarce.’ (End of excerpt)

“They also need to understand the motivations of the people and the systems they interact with, many of which will be empowered and driven by AI that reflects the goals of the people and institutions and systems that control them. It’s as simple as that and as hard to accomplish as anything I can imagine.”

This essay was written in January 2025 in reply to the question: Over the next decade, what is likely to be the impact of AI advances on the experience of being human? How might the expanding interactions between humans and AI affect what many people view today as ‘core human traits and behaviors’? This and nearly 200 additional essay responses are included in the 2025 report “Being Human in 2035.”

More Information

Wikipedia

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951[1]) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing. Dyson is also an angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space.[2] Dyson’s career now focuses on health[3] and she continues to invest in health and technology startups.

Education and early life

Esther Dyson’s father was English-born, American-naturalized physicist Freeman Dyson, and her mother was mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, of Swiss parentage; her brother is science historian George Dyson. Her paternal grandfather was the composer Sir George Dyson.[4] She was educated at Harvard University, where she studied economics and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.[5]

Career

After graduating she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities[6] following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer Holdings covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research in 1982. In 1983, when she bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, Dyson renamed the company EDventure Holdings and his Rosen Electronic Letter newsletter Release 1.0.[7] She and business partner Daphne Kis sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004 and left CNET in January 2007.

On 7 October 2008, Space Adventures announced that Dyson had paid to train as a back-up spaceflight participant for Charles Simonyi‘s trip to the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 mission which took place in 2009.[8]

In 1997, Dyson wrote that as of that time she had never voted.[5] The tagline of her email signature block reads “Always make new mistakes”.[9]

Publications and business ventures

Dyson said, “I’m flying!”, 2007 courtesy Zero-G
Dyson in 2007

Currently, Dyson is a board member and active investor in a variety of start-ups, mostly in online services, health care, logistics, artificial intelligence, emerging markets, and space travel.[10] She was a board member of Yandex, which is considered the “Google of Russia,” until March 2022.[11]

Previously, Dyson and her company EDventure Holdings specialized in analyzing the effect of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies. She produced the following publications on technology:

  • Release 1.0, her monthly technology-industry newsletter (started by Ben Rosen), published by EDventure Holdings. Until 2006, Dyson wrote most issues herself and edited the others. When she left CNET, the newsletter was picked up by O’Reilly Media, which appointed Jimmy Guterman to edit it and renamed the newsletter Release 2.0.[12]
  • Rel-EAST, a sister newsletter focused on the technology industry in Eastern Europe.
  • Release 2.0, her 1997 book on how the Internet affects individuals’ lives. Its full title is Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. The revision Release 2.1 was published in 1998.

Philanthropy

Interview with Dyson on her time as the board chair of ICANN

Dyson is an active member of a number of non-profit and advisory organizations. From 1998 to 2000, she was the founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As of 2004, she sat on its “reform” committee (the At-Large Advisory Committee), dedicated to defining a role for individuals in ICANN’s decision-making and governance structures.[6] She opposed ICANN’s 2012 expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs).[13][14] She has followed closely the post-Soviet transition of Eastern Europe, from 2002 to 2012 was a member of the Bulgarian president’s IT Advisory Council, along with Vint Cerf, George Sadowsky, and Veni Markovski, among others. She has served as a trustee of, and helped fund, emerging organizations such as Glasses for Humanity, Bridges.org, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Eurasia Foundation, StopBadware, and the Sunlight Foundation. She was previously a member of the Global Business Network.[15]

Currently, she is a trustee of Charity Navigator, ExpandED Schools (outside-of-class services for kids), the Long Now Foundation, Open Corporates, and The Commons Project, where she chairs the comp and culture committee.

Other pursuits

Dyson was one of the first ten volunteers for George Church’s Personal Genome Project where you can find her complete genome.

Dyson has served as a judge[16] for Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s NYC BigApps competition in New York.

See also

References

  1. ^ Wray, Richard (30 January 2004). “The clean-up queen”. The Guardian.
  2. ^ Multiple citations:

  3. ^ Dyson, Ester (22 January 2014). The Anti-Fragility of Health. Project Syndicate.
  4. ^ Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite Archived 10 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine by John Brockman (HardWired Books, 1996)
  5. ^ a b Esther Dyson (13 October 1997). “The Accidental ‘Techie’“. Newsweek. pp. 79–86.
  6. ^ a b “Biographical Data on Esther Dyson”. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Archived from the original on 15 March 2014. Retrieved 12 October 2008. Esther Dyson, former Chairman of the ICANN Board [..] She was appointed as one of ICANN’s nine initial directors in October 1998. She served as an ICANN director until 16 November 2000.
  7. ^ about which she wrote in 1997: “RELease 1.0 – get it?”
  8. ^ “Space Adventures Announces Esther Dyson as Back-Up Crew Member for Spring 2009 Spaceflight Mission” Archived 15 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine. Space Adventures. 7 October 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-12. “Esther Dyson, an investor in Space Adventures [..] will train as the back-up crew member alongside orbital spaceflight candidate Charles Simonyi, PhD, who is currently planning a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in spring 2009. [..] The price of the back-up crew member program is $3,000,000 (USD), which includes the required spaceflight training costs, along with accommodations in Star City”
  9. ^ “Always make new mistakes”. June 2012.
  10. ^ Esther Dyson’s Board Seats & Investments. EDventure.
  11. ^ Peterson, Becky. “Inside the boardroom shattering at Yandex, Russia’s biggest tech company, sent into free fall by Putin’s Ukraine war”. Retrieved 28 June 2023.
  12. ^ Release 1.0 and 2.0 Archived 17 February 2019 at the Wayback Machine at O’Reilly
  13. ^ Dyson, Esther. “What’s in a Domain Name?”. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  14. ^ “Top Level Domain Expansion Update: Brand Owners Air Concerns in Washington | Internet and Cyberlaw | Marshall Gerstein & Borun LLP”. Marshall Gerstein & Borun LLP. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
  15. ^ “Esther Dyson”. Global Business Network. Archived from the original on 30 December 2010.
  16. ^ “Mayor Bloomberg Announces Winners of NYC BIGAPPS 2.0 Competition”. NYC.gov. 31 March 2011. Retrieved 5 June 2013.


source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Dyson

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