Marketing AI Profile: Douglas Rushkoff
Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Dr. Rushkoff is a media and cultural theorist, author of twenty books on technology and society including Media Virus, Cyberia, Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Program or Be Programmed. Douglas is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures and institutions create, share and influence each other’s values.
Douglas is best known for coining terms like Media Virus, Social Media, and Digital Natives, as well as making the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation.
He is also the host of the Team Human podcast and upcoming Team Human manifesto.
Douglas is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism. Douglas is also a Fellow of the Institute for the Future, and advisor to LongPath Foundation, Civic Hall, Digital Town, Meetup, and Minds.com.
University of Utrecht, PhD New Media Studies and Digital Games
The American Film Institute, Post Graduate Fellowship Film Directing
California Institute of the Arts, MFA Theater/Film
“The minute humans are outpaced by artificial intelligence – the moment of the ‘singularity’ – we will be officially and effectively obsolete. Well, I don’t buy that.”
“To a hammer, everything is a nail. To AI, everything is a computational challenge.”
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
MAICON 2019 – Team Human It’s Time to Remake Society Together as the Team We Are
To Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human is a manifesto—a fiery distillation of his most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In this new talk, drawn from his book of the same name, Rushkoff argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together—not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as a way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the Internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups. This talk is Rushkoff’s impassioned call to arms—to recognize that being human is a team sport. In Rushkoff’s own words: “Being social may be the whole point.” Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology, and psychology, Rushkoff will show your audience that when we work together, we realize greater happiness, productivity, and peace. If we can understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity—together—we can make the world a better place to be human.
Recent Events
Team Human Live 2018
SXSW Interactive 2018
Books by Douglas Rushkoff
Dr. Rushkoff has written twenty books on technology and society. Here are his two latest publications.
In one hundred lean and incisive statements, Douglas Rushkoff argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together―not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation. Education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line. The internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups.
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
In this groundbreaking book, Douglas Rushkoff tells us how to combine the best of human nature with the best of modern technology. Tying together disparate threads—big data, the rise of robots and AI, the increasing participation of algorithms in stock market trading, the gig economy, the collapse of the eurozone—Rushkoff provides a critical vocabulary for our economic moment and a nuanced portrait of humans and commerce at a critical crossroads.
Douglas Rushkoff on Artificial Intelligence
Team Human vs. Team AI
As a society, we need to get our priorities straight. According to Dr. Rushkoff, “to make artificial intelligence live up to its promise, we need to understand and reframe the values implicit in the technology.” The problem, as he sees it, is that we’re building a “world around what our technologies can do” instead of what we need. He points out that more people work on making social media feeds persuasive than increasing the accessibility of clean water
Team Human Ep. 53: IBM Watson “If I Only Had A Brain”
This episode features an excerpt of a panel discussion recorded on location at IBM Watson in New York in August 2015, hosted by Douglas Rushkoff. He is joined by philosopher-sociologist Steve Fuller, tech entrepreneur and ethicist Martine Rothblatt, IBM Watson researcher Michael Karasick, and philosopher of technology, Dan O’Hara.
Remember to have a look at our list of who is who in AI marketing.
Stephen leads the content strategy blog for MarketMuse, an AI-powered Content Intelligence and Strategy Platform. You can connect with him on social or his personal blog.