Institute For The Future

Oct 10-12: Reconfiguring Reality Conference

Reconfiguring Reality: Toward an Internet of Actions

October 10-12, 2017  |  Institute for the Future  |  Palo Alto, California 

IFTF's Tech Futures Lab will host a hands-on exploration of the future on October 10-12 featuring leading thinkers, researchers, and technologists and jump start our partners strategic efforts to reconfigure reality in the emerging Internet of Actions.

We'll be hearing from thought leaders such as:

• Ferdinando Buscema, Magic Experience Designer—The Horizon of the Possible
• Sam Woolley, Research Director IFTF—Bots, Disinformation, and the Future of Computational Propaganda
• Crystal Beasley, Founder of Embodied Reality—Altering Human Perception
• Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow at IFTF—The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything

Reconfiguring Reality

Over the next decade, advances across the technology stack will combine to reveal a world where inanimate objects converse with us, bots act on our behalf, and networked machines negotiate with each other, hopefully with our best interests in mind. But what, and whose, values should we encode into these intelligent objects and networked terrains? What do we really want from these billions of intelligent, autonomous machines who will soon inhabit our business, social, and civic spheres?

In collaboration with with a vast network of intelligent machines, we'll be able to reconfigure every aspect of reality. We'll alter our perceptions with data science and machine learning aided by insights from psychology and neuroscience. We'll systematize profits, personal empowerment, social interaction, and legal enforcement by encoding human activity into distributed systems embedded with ubiquitous sensing and utility machine intelligence. We'll manipulate matter in places and at scales where humans have never been able to operate through the use of nanoengineering, 3D printing, and robotics. We'll awaken and animate objects and environments by giving them personalities, emotions, and voice and gestural interfaces.

As these autonomous machines are introduced and search out ways to be valuable, we’ll come to understand their worth not simply through their ability to deliver information, but also through the ways in which they can take action in the physical world. But to what end? The ability to reconfigure reality is full of enormous possibilities that will challenge us to push beyond familiar goals of productivity and convenience and imagine how to harness the Internet of Actions to optimize for a wider array of values and possibilities.

Evening event open to the public with advance RSVP:
SAM WOOLLEY on
BOTS, DISINFORMATION, & THE FUTURE OF COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA

Oct 11: 6-7pm

Join us for a conversation with Sam Woolley, IFTF's newest Research Director, who is leading our newly formed Digital Intelligence (DigIntel) Lab. He specializes in the study of automation/AI, political communication, and information warfare. Woolley is a co-founder and the former research director of the Computational Propaganda (ComProp) research team at the University of Oxford and the University of Washington.
Promotional Code: VIPCOMP11

Interested in learning more?

For more details on how to partner with Institute for the Future and attend this conference, please contact:

Sean Ness | [email protected] | 650-233-9517