People

Peter Schwartz

Peter Schwartz

Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations & Strategic Planning, SalesForce

Biography

Peter Schwartz is co-founder and chairman of Global Business Network, a Monitor Group company, and a partner of the Monitor Group, a family of professional services firms devoted to enhancing client competitiveness. He is also Senior Vice President of Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning at Salesforce.com.  An internationally renowned futurist and business strategist, Peter specializes in scenario planning, working with corporations, governments, and institutions to create alternative perspectives of the future and develop robust strategies for a changing and uncertain world. His current research and scenario work is particularly focused on climate change and national security issues, and also encompasses energy resources and the environment, technology, telecommunications and aerospace. He creates private discontinuity committees to help senior advisors and policy makers avoid strategic surprise by identifying relevant threats and opportunities and designing creative strategies for avoiding or embracing them as appropriate.

Peter is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council, the World Affairs Council and, in Singapore, the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council. He also sits on the boards of The Long Now Foundation, The Center for New American Security, and the Center for Strategic Studies.

From 1982 to 1986, Peter headed scenario planning for the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies in London. His team conducted comprehensive analyses of the global business and political environment and worked with senior management to create successful strategies. Before joining Royal Dutch/Shell, Peter directed the Strategic Environment Center at SRI International. The Center researched the business milieu, lifestyles, and consumer values, and conducted scenario planning for corporate and government clients. Peter is the author of Inevitable Surprises (Gotham, 2003), a provocative look at the dynamic forces at play in the world today and their implications for business and society. His first book, The Art of the Long View (Doubleday Currency, 1991; audio tape, 1995; paperback, 1996), is considered a seminal publication on scenario planning and has been translated into multiple languages. He is also the co-author of The Long Boom (Perseus, 1999), a vision for the world characterized by global openness, prosperity, and discovery; When Good Companies Do Bad Things (Wiley, 1999), an examination of, and argument for, corporate social responsibility; and China’s Futures (Jossey-Bass, 2001), which describes very different scenarios for China and their international implications. He publishes and lectures widely and served as a script consultant on the films “The Minority Report,” “Deep Impact,” “Sneakers,” and “War Games.” Peter received a B.S. in aeronautical engineering and astronautics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Schwartz was previously a member of the 21st Century Council, Council for the Future of Europe, and The WorldPost Advisory Council.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE