Intel's futurologist: we will soon live in computers

Technologies are developing at such a rapid pace that it is difficult to imagine what awaits us tomorrow. However, some still succeed. For Brian David Johnson, Intel's futurist resident, tomorrow is predictable, but still ticklish, like a pre-holiday feeling.

“I always tell people that they shouldn’t worry about the future,” Johnson said at a social innovation festival in New York. - “The future promises to be awesome, because it is created by people. Technology does not solve anything. People decide.

Designing or predicting the future is a joint work of sociology, research, technical data, economic trends, and even science fiction to predict the future. In his position at Intel, Johnson first studies how people will interact with technology after 10-15 years.

Johnson has always been a futurologist, even before he settled on Intel 10 years ago. His father was a radar tracking engineer, and his mother was an IT specialist and taught computer science at a local college in Manassas, Virginia. At that time, the future futurologist was 10 years old. Johnson worked on interactive television in Scandinavia and the UK even before the Internet appeared, trying to give viewers the opportunity to vote and buy things directly from television screens. Johnson also made films, wrote books and painted with acrylic paint. The combination of technical knowledge and the passion of telling stories and made him a futurologist.

Jimmy Robot

In Johnson’s vision of the future, people will be under control, but live in a world that will change dramatically under the influence of new technologies. The most powerful engine of progress will be a constantly decreasing computer chip, which will effectively go to zero until 2020. Five years ago, the average computer chip was about 22 nanometers across. Now it is 14 nanometers. By 2020, the computer chip will be 5 nanometers, Johnson believes. A chip that is 5 nanometers wide and 12 atoms across.

Johnson says smaller computer chips mean that almost everything can be turned into a computer.

“We will be surrounded by computing power. For ordinary people living in the outback, you will be walking computers, surrounded by information and computing power. "

Computers will be built into all sorts of medical devices, Johnson says.

“We can monitor our health every hour, every minute, based on the data we receive,” he says. For example, if a child has a cold, the computer that will be on his wrist will allow parents to notice an elevated temperature in time.

As for technology on a larger scale, Johnson believes that the computing power, which will be available in ten years, will allow us to create more sophisticated, detailed and large cities - megacities.

“We will be able to introduce electronics into the city’s infrastructure, thereby not only planting it, but also making it more effective from different points of view,” says Johnson. “Our cities will become computers, and when our cities become computers, we will be able to work with them.”

As with wearable technology and cities, the changes will affect our companions. Johnson's favorite device is Jimmy, the talking and walking robot. Jimmy was printed on a 3D printer about a month ago, and his open source code is available for updates, personalization and development. There are other "Jimmy" at different stages of production. This is a major step towards social robots.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/computers/futurolog-intel-skoro-my-budem-zhit-v-kompyuterax.html.