Brian David Johnson, Futurist at Intel Corporation, counters the myth of runaway, soulless machines, by investigating how technology reflects the mission and values of the societies that create it, in the first Dean's Distinguished Lecture for the 2014-2015 academic year.

From high-speed NASCAR racing to high-speed financial trading, we explore our intimate relationship with our machines and how we incessantly tune them for success, for profit, and routinely for greed. But what comes after greed? 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? Ultimately Johnson discovers how we can design our machines and technology to become the reflection of our better selves?

Tuesday
October 28
7-8:15 p.m.
Free and open to the public.

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