COFES Institute announces keynote at COFES 2018

Scottsdale, Ariz. — The COFES Institute announced venture capitalist and best-selling author, George Gilder, as a keynote speaker at COFES 2018 in Scottsdale, Ariz., April 12-15, 2018 at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort. Gilder will be a featured keynote speaker on Saturday.

This year at COFES 2018, the theme will be Human-Aided Design: Changing the Relationship between Our Tools and Us.

To request an invitation, visit https://apply.cofes.com. The annual four-day event for the design and engineering software industry brings together a diverse group of thought leaders in technology and science to engage in wide-ranging and meaningful discussions.

At COFES 2018, Gilder will be speaking about his forthcoming book, Life After Google, which is due to be published in 2018. The new book examines and discusses the coming profound shift in the global technological and business landscape being ushered in by blockchain and other emerging technologies.

“Mr. Gilder is an accomplished best-selling author and futurist,” said Vincent Caprio, COFES Institute President. “Gilder will challenge COFES attendees with new ideas and their application to the engineering software arena.”

“One of the key roles I have relished over the past 18 years was the opportunity to find and work with great keynoters for COFES,” said Brad Holz, co-founder of COFES, president and CEO of Cyon Research Corporation. “We look for folks who are way ahead of the curve, with ideas of significance, and who really want to engage with us. I’m delighted that the COFES Institute has been able to continue that tradition with George Gilder. While I may take personal issue with some of the positions he has taken on social issues in the past, he is indisputably a leading thinker on technology issues and I look forward to his latest work.”

Gilder is Chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC, in Great Barrington, Mass., and a founder-fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He is the author of 20 books on economics and technology including, Wealth and Poverty (1981), The Spirit of Enterprise (1986), Microcosm (1989), Life After Television (1990), Telecosm (2000), The Silicon Eye (2005), and The Israel Test (2009).

In the past decade, Gilder has begun revolutionizing the field of economics. In his book, Knowledge and Power (2013), Gilder presents a new economy based on the information theory that enabled the computer revolution and the rise of the internet. In a review, Steve Forbes stated that the book “will profoundly and positively reshape economics… (and) will rank as one of the most influential works of our era.” The book won the Leonard E. Read prize at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in 2013.

In his latest book, The Scandal of Money (2016), Gilder extends the economics of information theory into a prescription for overcoming worldwide disorders of money with new crypto-currencies linked to gold. James Grant, publisher of “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer,” stated that the book “will outlast the Federal Reserve.” Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel declared “he is our best guide to our most fundamental economic problem.”

Gilder is a contributing editor of Forbes magazine and a contributor to such publications as the Forbes, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.