{"id":240005,"date":"2026-06-30T10:06:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/futurist-brian-david-johnson-dont-let-the-future-happen-to-you"},"modified":"2026-06-30T10:06:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:06:10","slug":"futurist-brian-david-johnson-dont-let-the-future-happen-to-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/futurist-brian-david-johnson-dont-let-the-future-happen-to-you","title":{"rendered":"Futurist Brian David Johnson: Don\u2019t Let The Future Happen To You!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/futurist-brian-david-johnson-dont-let-the-future-happen-to-you.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/feeds.soundcloud.com\/stream\/196310185-singularity1on1-intel-futurist-brian-david-johnson.mp3?_=1\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I recorded this conversation with Brian David Johnson 14 years ago, back when he was Intel\u2019s futurist with 25 patents to his name and a mandate to build an actionable vision of computing for 2020.<\/p>\n<p>Read that again. 2020 was the far horizon he was paid to imagine. We are now well past it.<\/p>\n<p>So here is the uncomfortable question worth sitting with: how much of the future he described did we make happen on purpose, and how much simply happened to us while we wondered what was going on?<\/p>\n<p>Brian\u2019s whole method was a refusal to be passive about it. He used ethnographic fieldwork, trend data, and even science-fiction prototyping as a #design tool because he believed the future is not a forecast you wait for; it is an object you construct. His line still lands harder every year: own the fact that you can build the future.<\/p>\n<p>A few things he said in 2012 that read very differently in the age of generative #AI and ubiquitous #robotics:<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/futurist-brian-david-johnson-dont-let-the-future-happen-to-you\">Continue reading \u201cFuturist Brian David Johnson: Don\u2019t Let The Future Happen To You!\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWhen it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.\u201d I recorded this conversation with Brian David Johnson 14 years ago, back when he was Intel\u2019s futurist with 25 patents to his name and a mandate to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}