The Humanity of The Machine

Brian David Johnson

The Humanity of The Machine

Filmed on October 24, 2014, at “Gain: AIGA Design and Business Conference”

About this video

World-renowned futurist Brian David Johnson counters the myth of soulless runaway machines by investigating how technology reflects the mission and values of the societies that design and create it. We incessantly tune our machines for success profit and greed but what comes after greed?

What we’re designing why we’re building it and what we want our tools to accomplish are considerations that must be made. Should we optimize for fairness quality safety or social responsibility? Do we really comprehend the dark side of our choices? Discover how we can design our machines and technology to become a reflection of our better selves.

Speaker bio

The future is Brian David Johnson’s business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation his charter is to develop an actionable 10 to 15 year vision for the technology of tomorrow. His work called “futurecasting ” uses 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 developments in artificial intelligence and robotics and the use science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in publications including The Wall Street Journal and Slate as well as for IEEE Computer Society the world’s premiere organization of computing professionals.

Johnson has contributed to both science fiction and non-fiction books including Vintage Tomorrows (2013) Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction (2011) and Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices We Love (2010). He is a professor at the University of Washington and the California College of the Arts and lectures around the world. He appears regularly on Bloomberg TV the Discovery Channel Fox News and PBS and has been featured in Scientific American  MIT Technology Review  Forbes and Popular Science. Johnson has also directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.