John Markoff

John Markoff is currently a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence and an affiliate fellow in the Presence Center at the Stanford School of Medicine. Previously he was a senior writer at the New York Times where he worked from 1988 until he retired at the end of 2016. For much of his career at the Times he was based in San Francisco where he covered Silicon Valley. He also spent four years writing for the Times’ science section. His reporting focused on computer security issues and more generally on the impact of various information technologies on society. He wrote the first article to describe the arrival of the World Wide Web in 1993. Markoff is the author of six books including Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest For Common Ground Between Humans And Machines (Harper Collins, 2016) and Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), which were both written while at CASBS. His current research is focused on exploring the events that took place around Stanford University during the 1960s that led to the emergence of Silicon Valley as an innovation center during the following decade. Markoff was a CASBS fellow in 2017-18.