Brad Templeton

Location
United States
Areas of Expertise
Communities
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics

Expert Bio

Brad Templeton is a pioneering technologist, futurist, and internet entrepreneur best known as the founder of ClariNet, the world's first dot-com. A member of the early Google self-driving car team — now known as Waymo — Brad is one of the foremost experts and consultants on autonomous vehicles and robocar technology. He served as Founding Faculty and Chair of Computing and Networks at Singularity University, and is Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), where he has been a long-standing advocate for digital rights and civil liberties. Brad also serves as a Director of the Foresight Institute, a leading nanotechnology and futurist think tank. As a sought-after keynote speaker and strategic advisor, he has guided and invested in numerous top mobility companies spanning delivery robots, autonomous cars, electric scooters, shuttles, mini-cars, and VTOL aircraft. With a career spanning software development, internet innovation, AI, and the future of transportation, Brad Templeton remains a defining voice at the intersection of technology, autonomy, and the future of human mobility.

Sessions

Robocars: Computers driving cars and changing the world

Participants will hear the story of the marriage of computers and cars as it upends the world's largest industries (including their own) and exponential technology changes how and where we live and move.

Ground transportation plays a huge role in any business with products or employees, and in the personal and work life of every person. It defines the shape of our cities and the flow of our lives, and it's now in the middle of its digital transformation. It eats 60% of our cities, $5T of our money, tens of billions of hours of our time and 25% of our energy and kills over a million each year, and all that's about to change.

This is also one of the grandest exponential revolutions underway, with lessons for most industries, as well as implications for all of them.

Brad Templeton, who has advised Google/Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Starship and major car OEMs will paint the story of how this is happening and what it means, with a glimpse into the transportation and city of the future. Participants will learn what mistakes incumbents and governments are making and what startups do better, as well as a bit of philosophy.

Ideal for both executives keen to understand massive exponential transformation and the megatrends of the future, plus how their employees and products will move in that world, as well as investors affected by changes in transport, energy, retailing, industry and much more.

Companion Workshop: Future city of Robocars

Participants will find themselves in a city of the future, attempting to deal with social, economic and governance issues as computers take over cars, transit is disrupted, jobs shift and interests battle.

In combination with an introductory talk on the big changes to society driven by the computerization of transportation and shipping, these topics give an opportunity to explore deeper thoughts about the problems exponential change can bring to societies and companies.

Participants will find themselves in a town where self-driving cars are arriving but there is conflict over a key issue (the issue varies based on the news). They will split up into groups and role-play various stakeholders in society, like the tech companies, the car companies, the police, the homeless, the disabled, the unions, the taxi companies and others to work out positions to present at a "town hall" meeting and see how it resolves.

This workshop is ideal for those who want to immerse in the coming debates over how technology changes society, and how they affect the businesses and other stakeholders involved.

Everything your business needs to know it can learn from the computer industry

Participants will experience a series of lessons about how to handle rapidly changing exponential technology based on things learned by the computer and internet industries which didn't just create many of these technologies but how to adapt to them at the same time.

These industries have had no choice but to live in the world they created, and for over 50 years, they have thrived while all their products, suppliers and competitors have seen things double every couple of years, and every product is obsolete before you can blink. Only these industries have the long experience and while many tech companies have died, others have thrived to become the world's most successful organizations.

Brad Templeton, who has lived this revolution from working on the first spreadsheet at the dawn of the PC to creating the first dot-com business to helping lead the self-driving revolution. He'll explain how all companies have to turn themselves into nimble, software-based entities ready for the future. Participants will hear about Moore's Law, the internet's secret, software eating the world, open systems, disruption, founder-leadership and acting like a startup.

This talk, together with the workshop, is for any executive or investor hoping to understand how to thrive in the exponential revolution by learning the lessons of those who have actually done it.

How every company can become a software company

Participants will work hands-on at exploring how to turn a business that does not appear software based into one ready for the 21st century - sometimes called a "digital transformation."

Perhaps the most important lesson for managers to come away with from an SU program is how they can move their business into the exponential, digital world. It can often be challenging to look at a business that has always been about non-digital things and set it up to compete in the digital world.

Participants will break out into groups. In their group, they will discuss their businesses and quickly decide which one seems like it might be the hardest to bring into the exponential world. Then they will apply the things they have learned in earlier talks (including the talk above about learning from software people, which is a recommended pairing) and lay out a series of steps to help transform that business. They will be aided by faculty and SU staff. At the end each group will present their problem and their top recommendations.

This is for anybody managing a business that isn't a fully digital silicon valley style tech business, and those investing in them. Success in this workshop should provide one of the most valued take-aways from the program.

The Future of Computing & The Internet

History of Innovation and Technology, Information Technology, Change Management, Disruption, Digital Transformation

Simply put, you'll take a tour of the latest hot trends for the future of computers and networking. Computing and the internet are the core exponential technologies that underlie everything at Singularity University; no understanding of the future of technology is complete without them.

Participants will delve into a variety of topics including:

- Lessons from the Internet on an exponential revolution: What the internet and software teach about how to run a company in the 21st century.

- The coming abundance of bandwidth (including Starlink)

- New user interfaces including augmented and virtual reality

- The Internet of Things (optional demo of bluetooth tags.) Note this is a somewhat skeptical presentation which points out that the IoT is still a marketing concept rather than well understood changer of how people live, but it covers what's really happening.

- Quick Moore's Law introduction

- Quick bitcoin introduction if not being covered elsewhere (10 minutes)

This session is important for anybody trying to understand exponential technologies and trends, since almost all are driven by computing, networking or both.

Moore's Law

Participants will get a grasp of what Moore's law is, how it drove all exponential technology, and where it's going.

Of all the technological trends, the archetype of the exponential technology is the rise of the computer chip due to Moore's Law. Any good grounding in exponential technology has some understanding of all the challenges faced in order to make it happen.

The session will examine the dawn of microprocessors, and the various methods invented to make them smaller, faster, cheaper and lower power, and how they kept doing that again and again, as well as changing the way software works from linear to parallel, and what people hope to do to keep it going.

This session is for anybody trying to understand the history and future of the computer chip and how it drove exponential technology.

Computer Insecurity

Computation, Blockchain, Decentralization, Globalization, Philosophy of Information

Participants will dive into issues of computer security and why and where it fails, as well as an introduction to the important concepts of public key cryptography and signature that underlie all the world's financial and data security.

Privacy and security are some of the biggest issues in a world with cryptocurrency, AI and massive data gathering.

This (usually combined with the privacy talk and/or workshop) provides a grounding in important concepts of computer security, privacy and other civil rights issues around the computer revolution and exponential change.

This is for anybody concerned about how we preserve our values and freedoms and how companies protect those things for their customers. This is also useful if one wishes to understand cryptocurrency and blockchains.

Computers, Privacy and the NSA

Computation, Accelerating Change, Disruption, Economics, Philosophy of Technology

Participants will explore how computer technology puts our privacy and other rights at risk with the former chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading online civil rights group.

Exponential technologies are not always positive, and they have significant effects on our rights and values. No discussion of the technologies is complete without a dive into some of the issues and downsides.

This talk will cover why we care about privacy, how it's being eroded, and what can be done about it. There will be particular attention to what's been revealed by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden on the activities of the major spying agencies in the west, such as the NSA. We'll also look at the risks of our move into the cloud, and what AI means for rights in the future.

This talk is for anybody ready for - or hungry for - a more complete understanding of the ups and downs of the rapidly changing technologies. It is often combined with a workshop that brings it home.

Companion Workshop: Surveillance City of the Future

Cybersecurity, Regulation and Policy, Decision Making, Risk Management, Mental Health

Participants will learn about privacy issues, then roleplay citizens of the future trying to fight political battles over surveillance. This workshop allows more direct, and entertaining, immersion into the ethical and political issues of exponential technology. Participants are placed in a city of the future which is debating installing a giant surveillance system with cameras everywhere and AIs that spot all the faces and tie all movements to data collected from social networks and online activity to reduce crime and terrorism. They split into groups to role-play stakeholders like police, spies, the poor, the counterculture and the mafia to debate whether the town should install the system. People generally have fun playing these roles before the crowd and come to understand other viewpoints. This is for people who want to explore the dark side and the politics of AI, computing and surveillance and see it from a wide variety of perspectives.

Intro to Exponential & Silicon Valley Thinking

Cybersecurity, Law and Policy, Civil Liberties, Organizational Ethics, Mental Health

Singularity University programs always begin with an introduction to the general thinking behind the whole institution, the idea of learning from the computer revolution to break habits of linear thinking and move into exponential thinking. This is the story of how exponential change is rewriting the world and every industry and how companies can deal with this disruption. It includes some key lessons from computers and networks on how to have an exponential revolution. I also have the ability to do general introductions to all the exponential topics, such as digital biology, medicine, energy, new business models & disruption, AI, robotics, forecasting, the future of work, open source, policy and ethics and much more.

A key part of this talk (and which can be in any talk) is discussion of the "secret" of Silicon Valley -- what ingredients it, and the digital industries, have which have made it the world capital of innovation and technology.

Bitcoins and the Future of Money

Cybersecurity, Law and Policy, Civil Liberties, Organizational Ethics, Mental Health

A new digital money named Bitcoin is sweeping the world. Bitcoin is a digital money that decentralizes banking, a currency that can cross borders, allows mostly anonymous payment, but works without banks or nations. In the longer version, an understanding of how Bitcoin works and the issues behind it is presented, and in the workshop, participants are given a small amount of bitcoin and get to transact and exchange bitcoin with other participants, and if suitable, use it to buy prizes or "shwag" from the conference organizer. Typically participants should receive $5 to $20 worth of bitcoin as part of the budget, which they will keep afterwards unless they spend it there.

In addition, if participants receive 3 to 4 six-sided dice each, we can do a simulation of how the Bitcoin system actually works -- something that's fairly difficult to understand.

Audiences are full of questions on Bitcoin and expect Q&A to go as long as you let it.

A much shorter introduction to why people care about Bitcoin can be done in 5-10 minutes and is done as part of the "Future of Computing" session.

Expert Bio

Sessions

Request Info

Subscribe to Our Newsletter