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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 Robots  

Brian David Johnson, a futurist at Intel, has shown off 'Jimmy' at this year's Maker Faire. Jimmy is said to be a robot for the 21st Century. His artificial intelligence will be open source as is the design and the technical description for 3D printing his parts.

Intel's resident futurist Brian David Johnson has shown off 'Jimmy' at this year's Maker Faire. Jimmy is said to be a robot for the 21st Century.   Jimmy's artificial intelligence will be open source as is the design and the technical description for 3D printing his parts.

Johnson, has been toying with the idea of the future’s robots for more than a decade at Intel. According to the futurist,these robots are going to be infinitely programmable, and very personal for each creator.

“We can come to see these robots as an extension of ourselves, and that these are platforms to create as many of them as we can,” Johnson said at the recent Intel Developer Forum. “Our motto is that every robot has a name.”

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Johnson described Jimmy in a new free e-book, which has a manifesto for what a 21st Century Robot should be. Jimmy is as programmable as a smartphone. Johnson wrote the book with all of the open source files for printing the robot as a 3D object.

The book represents what Johnson described in his book, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, and has been carried over into Intel's Tomorrow Project.

“It’s there and ready to use,” David Johnson said. “We are creating new ways of interacting with robots.”

Johnson said the robot will be available to buy for less than $1,000 in the coming months, and he is trying to get the whole cost under $500.  The goal is ambitious, to make robots more personal.

“There is no line between robots and our humanity," Johnson said. “Everything we make has a little bit of us in it. As we begin to see these robots as extensions of ourselves and allow them to go off and interact with other people and other robots. We can begin to think of these robots as extensions of ourselves.”

Johnson wants to hold robot Maker Faires around the country, sharing the design with people via robot kits. Jimmy will have a companion robot, Paul, that Jimmy can talk with.




SOURCE  Venture Beat

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Peter Biddle, Intel's General Manager of Services Platform, and Brian David Johnson, Intel's Futurist, and author of Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing and the Devices We Love talk about how technology can help solve some of humanity's greatest challenges including global warming.

Experts from Intel Corporation discuss major problems facing humanity, including global warming, an aging world population and the relentless pace of technology. Will better technology solve these problems or are humans hitting a fundamental physical barrier to progress?