Brian David Johnson is an applied futurist who works with organizations to develop actionable 10-15 year visions of what it will feel like to live in the future. His methods are futurecasting and threatcasting, which entail using ethnographic field studies, technology research, cultural history, trend data, interviews, and science fiction to provide a pragmatic roadmap of the future and to identify opportunities and threats. He has worked with governments, trade organizations, startups, and multinational corporations, helping to envision their futures and to specify the steps needed to get there.
Johnson is a senior fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination and an analyst and senior fellow at Phaedrus. Johnson was the first futurist ever appointed at the Intel Corporation in 2009, where he worked for more than a decade. He appears regularly on the BBC, Bloomberg TV, PBS, and the Discovery Channel, and has been featured in Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, Forbes, Inc., and Popular Science. He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter. In 2016, Samuel Goldwyn Films released Vintage Tomorrows, a documentary based upon his 2013 book of the same title (cowritten with the cultural historian James H. Carrott).
Johnson speaks and writes extensively in ongoing columns for Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society, and Successful Farming, where he is the “Farm Futurist.” He has contributed articles to the Wall Street Journal, Slate, and Wired. He is the bestselling author of books of both science fiction and fact, including What You Need to Know about AI (2024), The Future You (2022), WaR: Wizards and Robots (2018), and 21st Century Robot (2014).
brian.david.johnson@asu.edu
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Projects: The Future of the American Dream | 21st Century Robot