In 2006, he joined the scientific-advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation, which, among other things, is dedicated to making sure humanity survives the advent of AI. In 2007, he led a brainstorming session about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness at the Googleplex, the international headquarters of Google.
In 2008, he spoke at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington, D.C. In 2010, Rob gave a keynote address at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference at the University of Arizona, and he’s also spoken on machine consciousness at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and to the Math and Physics Department at the University of Waterloo.
Rob’s novel
In total, Rob has won forty-four national and international awards for his fiction, including eleven Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“Auroras”), as well as
Rob has won the world’s largest cash prize for SF writing, Spain’s 6,000-euro Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficcion, an unprecedented three times. He’s also won a trio of Japanese Seiun awards for best foreign novel of the year, as well as China’s Galaxy Award for “Most Popular Foreign Science Fiction Writer.”
In addition, he’s received an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University and the Alumni Award of Distinction from Ryerson University.
Rob lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, with poet Carolyn Clink. His website and blog are at sfwriter.com, and on Twitter and Facebook he’s RobertJSawyer.