What Comes After Greed?

 Futurism  

Futurist, Brian David Johnson, counters the myth of runaway, soulless machines, by investigating how technology reflects the mission and values of the societies that create it. Examining high-speed financial trading, Johnson explores our intimate relationship with our machines.

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020.

In this first of the series Humanity in the Machine: What Comes After Greed? Johnson, counters the myth of runaway, soulless machines, by investigating how technology reflects the mission and values of the societies that create it. Johnson explores our intimate relationship with our machines and how we incessantly tune them for success, for profit, and routinely for greed. One of the key elements propelling the creation of profit today is high-frequency trading or algorithmic trading.

According to Johnson, "As we start futurehunting, we need to have an understanding of the underlying technology that is enabling algo trading."  By demystifying the technology and science he believes we can better understand the machine.

Understanding that we imbue our technology and machines with our humanity means we must think more closely about what we are building, why we are building it, and what we want our tools to accomplish. Can we optimize for something other than profit? Streamline for profit plus... other values: fairness, quality, safety or social responsibility. How do we comprehend the dark side of our choices?

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Ultimately Johnson discovers how we can design our machines and technology to become the reflection of our better selves?

Johnson's work is called "future casting"' using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool.

He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels including Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories. He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.


SOURCE  TEDx Talks

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