Brian David Johnson, a principal engineer and futurist at Intel, determines people’s needs for new technology based on studies by social scientists. He is currently focused on the year 2020.

His findings include:

• The way people like television is a mix between television, games, and films; everything outside of people’s work, actually, layered over each other with hyperpersonalization. We then designed prototype chips that have the ability to bring the Internet and the television on one screen at the same time, enabling between two and four layers of high-definition video, which it can overlay with HTML and Web.
• Science fiction based on science fact gives us a language to talk about the future. It triggers people to think about this future, whether they like it or not; what they are afraid of or excited about.
• Looking at the past, technology has been about command and control. In the future it will be about relationships.
• As we move closer to 2020, the size of computational chips is becoming so small that it is approaching zero. This means we could literally turn anything into a computer. There is a switch coming, where we do not have to ask: “Can we turn that into a computer?” But rather: “Is there a use to do it?”
• The Intel project called The Future of Fear looks at negative impacts of computers.
• An interesting study by the University of British Columbia published in Science magazine last July showed that we are off-loading our memory to our devices. We have lower rates of recall to information but higher recall rates for access to the information. This is not new. We have been off-loading our oral history to books. That is not bad — it’s progression.
• I do not predict. Anyone who does predictions is underestimating the complexity of developments. It is my job to look ahead and anticipate — we roughly think that this is going to be it. I don’t want to be right, I want to get it right, work towards it.