Piero Scaruffi is an Italian-American freelance software consultant, university lecturer, and writer who maintains a website on which his reviews of music, film, and art are published. He has created his own publishing society called Omnipublishing that exclusively releases his books about music and science. Since 1983, Scaruffi has resided in Silicon Valley, California. Scaruffi's website, which covers a wide range of topics, was the subject of a 2006 article by Dan Morrell in The New York Times.
For a number of years he worked for Olivetti on artificial intelligence. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University and Stanford University, lectured on "The Nature of Mind" and "History of Knowledge", and published on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, including Thinking About Thought and The Nature of Consciousness. His work aims to bridge artificial intelligence, mathematics, science and art. As a software consultant, he worked on Internet applications, Artificial Intelligence and Object-Oriented design in Silicon Valley. He is an Italian naturalized American. He also writes about music. He has self-published books on Omniware, a publishing company of which he is also the president and founder. Omniware has so far exclusively released books by Scaruffi. He published books about the history of rock music, jazz, avant garde music and modern popular music. One of them, A History of Rock Music, 1951–2000, self-published on iUniverse in 2003, spans 50 years of the genre; Scaruffi estimated that it had sold 1,500 copies by 2006. His writings on music are hosted online on his own website, scaruffi.com, and include a history of jazz and a history of modern classical music. The website, especially its music section, was the subject of an article in The New York Times by Dan Morrell on October 15, 2006. Morrell noted the "staggering" volume of Scaruffi's work, given that the site is "a one-man operation". From 2000 to 2003 he was a member of the Governing Board of Directors of the journal Leonardo. The most widely known entry on Scaruffi's website is his career-spanning essay on the Beatles, effectively a polemic against the critical and popular consensus regarding the band's influence on modern music. The piece's opening paragraph has become a popular copypasta on image boards like 4chan. Scaruffi chaired, among others, the Big Bang conference of June 2008 at UC-Berkeley. He has compiled an extensive "Annotated Bibliography of Mind-Related" Topics", as well. He has been running the Leonardo Art Science Evenings at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University since 2008. He also runs the interdisciplinary quarterly events SMMMASH at Stanford University. Scaruffi is involved in organising and moderating events for Stanford Continuing Studies.
Worldview
Scaruffi's atheism is apparent from his belief that "Religion is the ultimate evil, because it is founded on a lie ".
