Brian David Johnson is speaking at WIRED Retail on 24 November. Tickets are on sale now: see wiredevent.co.uk/wired-retail for a full speaker list and further information. WIRED Subscribers receive a 10 percent discount.
"I think it was a crowning achievement of my work as a futurist that I've now made robots that wear capes," Intel Corporation's futurist Brian David Johnson laughs. "I've also made robots that wear pants, which is pretty cool."
Johnson is discussing a project that recently launched earlier in the year called the 21stCentury Robot -- a customisable 3D printed robot running on an Intel Edison chip, an exoskeleton and open source software. Working with robotics company Trossen Robotics, and sourcing the designs of the robot shells from three 11-year-old students from a local school in the Bronx, New York, Johnson and his team built "three very unique and special robots". "Not only did they design how they looked and their personalities, but we worked with them to create apps for the robots as well," Johnson says.
"One of the robots told really bad robot jokes, another robot danced, and when that robot came walkingout and started singing... all of these kids between five- and ten-years-old just lit up. They were just there, surrounding the robot and just watching this robot sing and dance. It was truly incredible."
His work for the past 20 years as a futurist has been looking at where technology lives within society ten to 15 years from now. 21stCentury Robot is just a piece of what Johnson explains is incredibly important to keep in mind about the future. "We're living in a time where you have a generation who has never known a moment when there wasn't the internet," he says. "They've never known a time when you couldn't walk up to a screen and ask that screen for information and get it back in under a second. The things that this generation are building are absolutely amazing."
The designs of the robots have been freely shared in the hopes younger people make their own versions and even improve upon the original design. This open source approach may not sound attractive to those working in the retail industry, but Johnson highlights a key point most people miss when they hear "open source". "Open source also doesn't mean everything's for free," Johnson begins.
"Even open source hardware manufacturers like the one we work with for the 21st Century Robot project benefit from this. We did designs with them, and they give their designs away so others can improve on them. How they make their money is selling the servos and wires inside."
By sharing designs with the public, it can actually improve sales long-term, as "it brings in more innovation and more creativity, and it can actually grow the market so that more people will want to buy and make their own".
Another key point, and what Johnson sees as one of the biggest moments that will define how we see technology, is the size of computational power. "We're beginning to approach zero," he begins when explaining nanometre size on processing chip nodes. "Where now we're at 14 nanometres, as we get to the year 2020 the size gets to about five nanometres -- that's about 12 atoms across. It's crazy. It means we can turn anything into a computer."
By surrounding people with computational intelligence, like in a shopping centre for example, people's lives could vastly improve. "You can turn the floors and the walls and the racks and the shelves into something that makes people's lives better," Johnson says. "If you have a child with a nut allergy and you walk into the store, and it knows via your smartphone or clothes or your wearable that your son or daughter has a nut allergy, it could turn all the products that have nuts in them or have contact with nuts black. Very simple thing to do, but hugely impactful."
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The world according to Intel's futurist | Wired Retail preview