David Orban's Blog

In 2015, I finished writing a book about artificial intelligence that almost no one asked for. At the time, AI was still primarily a research story. Deep learning was advancing, but foundation models did not exist. There were no systems embedded in everyday workflows, no AI‑generated text saturating the internet, no sustained policy debates about […]

Value exchange has always rested on a simple principle: voluntary participation creates positive-sum outcomes. That was true in ancient barter and remains true in today’s digital networks. What has changed is our capacity to coordinate these win–win interactions.  This is an edited transcript of my remarks at Token Talks & Tastes 2.0 for the panel […]

For the past 30 years I have been building companies across multiple geographies. Creating plans, founding teams, joining opportunities, raising capital, investing: the full spectrum of entrepreneurial activity, unconstrained by a single location. Ten years ago Network Society Labs, a global network of blockchain consulting groups, operated offices in San Francisco, Buenos Aires, London, Malta, […]

I am joining Al Liwan Group, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, as Head of Innovation, to advance our mission by embedding advanced technologies into every layer of the organisation and empowering people to operate at the frontier of what modern finance can achieve. Across the arc of recorded history, the systems that track value and enable exchange […]

The following is an edited transcript of my keynote presentation at The Futurists X Summit held in Dubai in September 2025. Humanity can flourish in the age of AI and robots: I believe that through them we will gain new degrees of freedom, and it will enable us to decide and design our future. My […]

When xAI launched Grokipedia in October 2025, claiming it would be a “massive improvement over Wikipedia,” I was curious, and decided to compare them scientifically on topics where I have expertise. (Read the full report online at pedia.davidorban.com) Why This Comparison Matters Grokipedia is explicitly in early beta and doesn’t yet have universal coverage. So instead of focusing […]

You know you’ll live in the future, right? We are all time travelers going at a speed of one minute per minute towards a future that we should be able to shape. So that when we get there, we like it! I invite you to join me at the Futurists X Summit on September 22-23 […]

Early Adopters Love AI But Fear Its Future Artificial intelligence is changing how we work, think, and interact. But beneath the excitement, a paradox is emerging. Early adopters, the people who use AI the most, say they personally benefit from it, yet they worry about its consequences for society. This tension is what I call […]

The Jolting Technologies Hypothesis is a complete framework for interpreting an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world What if the world isn’t changing exponentially, but superexponentially? What if the acceleration itself is accelerating? What if the mathematical models we use to predict technological progress, guiding trillion-dollar investments, inform startup strategies, and shape government policies, are […]

Experience scalable leadership through the lens of artificial intelligence. What if your insights could be available 24/7, across the globe, without needing to clone your calendar? That is not a thought experiment anymore, but an online service you can interact with today. I have built a digital version of myself: R. David Orban, and it […]