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Mark van Rijmenam

I think about technology and the impact on business & society.

Dr. Mark van Rijmenam, CSP, known as The Digital Speaker, is a strategic futurist, global keynote speaker, entrepreneur, and author.196 He empowers leaders to thrive amidst exponential change and is ranked as a top global futurist.112 He has spoken in over 25 countries across all continents, inspiring over 100,000 managers, directors, and C-level executives.12 Van Rijmenam is known for his balanced views on how emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and the metaverse can benefit and threaten organizations.1 He explains abstract concepts clearly through presentations, webinars, workshops, podcasts, newsletters, and books.1 Fortune 500 companies hire him to understand the impact of emerging technologies and to inspire teams to implement these technologies responsibly.1

In 2023, van Rijmenam received the Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) accreditation and was recognized as a Global Speaking Fellow.310 Thinkers360 also recognized him as a top global thought leader and influencer in AI and as a Top Voice in the APAC region.3 Salesforce has recognized him as a leading AI voice.412

Van Rijmenam has an eclectic academic background with degrees in Hospitality Management, Marketing Management, and a PhD in Management.1110 His research focuses on how organizations should navigate big data analytics, blockchain, and AI.1110

Experience and Accomplishments::

  • Award-winning Global Innovation Keynote Speaker (CSP) and Strategic Futurist: Since November 2012, van Rijmenam has been educating and inspiring corporations and governments on emerging technologies.1
  • Founder of Mavin: From October 2018 to July 2021, Mavin aimed to address the issue of rapidly disappearing trust in media.18
  • Consultant at Conversion Company: For six months in 2012, he advised companies on optimizing their online channels.1
  • Cyclist around Australia: From February 2009 to October 2011, he participated in a cycling tour for Stichting 100 dagen voor KiKa (100 days for KiKa).1
  • Author: Van Rijmenam is a five-time author. His books include "Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy" and "Future Visions," which was co-written with ChatGPT.579
  • TEDx Talks: In 2020, he gave the world's first TEDx talk in virtual reality. In 2023, he delivered another TEDx talk in Athens using a digital deepfake.11
  • The Digital Speaker App: He launched an app that offers real-time insights and on-demand interactions with his digital twin in nearly any language.11
  • Futurwise Institute: He is the founder of the Futurwise Institute, which focuses on elevating global digital awareness.579
  • Newsletter: Publisher of the ‘f(x) = e^x’ newsletter.57

Highlights

Feb 12 · twitter

This week, @MrinankSharma resigned from @Anthropic and published a blunt exit letter. This isn’t workplace gossip; it’s a signal we must take serious. Safety work inside a lab can be sincere and still lose to the economic gravity of “ship faster.”

That gravity isn’t a character flaw. It’s capitalism doing what it does: rewarding speed, scale, and market share, then outsourcing the consequences to society.

The industry is trapped in a perfect storm: VC timelines, competitive pressure, and “ship-first” cultures that treat governance as a tax. We’ve run this movie before.

Social media scaled faster than institutions could respond, and we’re still paying the price in polarization, surveillance, and broken attention.

The difference now is force-multiplication. AI doesn’t just optimize feeds; it will optimize decisions, workflows, weapons, persuasion, hiring, credit, and the administrative state. That means failures won’t only be cultural. They’ll be operational.

Isaac Asimov warned us in 1988: “𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑔𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤𝑙𝑒𝑑𝑔𝑒 𝑓𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑡𝑦 𝑔𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑑𝑜𝑚.”  That gap is now a national security risk, an economic risk, and a moral risk. We’re entering an age where intelligence becomes abundant, cheap, and embedded everywhere, while human judgment becomes scarce and fragmented.

And no, we cannot “leave it to the companies.” They are in a perfect storm: venture timelines, competitive escalation, and geopolitical pressure.

Even with good intentions, the incentive stack rewards shipping capability, not proving safety. That’s how systemic risks converge: progress outpaces the ability to foresee (unintended) consequences, and society pays the bill.

Especially, because we are not simply inventing AI; we are discovering emergent capabilities in complex systems we can’t fully explain or reliably control. That makes “move fast” governance suicidal at scale.

We are in this together, so we need to move forward together. That means: 👉 𝗚𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 must set hard safety floors for frontier AI: test before release, report incidents, prove provenance, punish negligence. 👉 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 must build technical teeth: independent audits, red-team disclosure, monitoring for misuse and drift. 👉 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰 must kill “trust us” governance and demand verifiable transparency and upgrade from passive consumption to active discernment. In this polycrisis, wisdom is not a virtue. It’s infrastructure.

If intelligence is becoming free, who is building the judgment layer, and who is accountable when it fails?

This week, @MrinankSharma resigned from @Anthropic and published a blunt exit letter. This isn’t wor
Jan 27 · twitter

A quiet shift is underway. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, just published a new essay and “The Adolescence of Technology” lands on an uncomfortable truth most AI debates are avoiding.

The real risk isn’t that AI becomes powerful. It will, that is a given. It’s that our institutions and societies aren’t mature enough to handle that power.

Intelligence is scaling faster than governance. Capability is outpacing responsibility.

We’re building systems that can analyse, predict, simulate and persuade at superhuman levels, while relying on political, legal and organisational structures that were designed for a world where intelligence was scarce and slow.

That mismatch is dangerous.

When intelligence is abundant:

  • every option looks defensible
  • every delay looks rational
  • every failure can be explained away

Decision-making doesn’t get better. It gets paralysed.

And the most tempting move becomes moral outsourcing: “The system recommended it.”

That’s not safety. That’s abdication.

The coming decade won’t be defined by who builds the smartest models. It will be defined by whether humans, leaders, boards, governments, are willing to reclaim judgment when certainty disappears, and risks scale exponentially.

AI is entering adolescence. The question is whether our institutions ever grew up.

https://t.co/TjCmenhVfC

A quiet shift is underway. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, just published a new essay and “The A

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Mark van Rijmenam
Mark van Rijmenam, photo 1
Mark van Rijmenam, photo 2
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Location

The Hague Area, Netherlands