Dr. Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin has spent a career explaining something that turns out to be unusually relevant right now, which is that people do not all think the same way, and that the differences between the way one mind works and another are not deficits to be corrected but capacities to be used.

She is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, with a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's and doctorate in animal science, and she is a visual thinker who has written for decades about the varieties of human thought. Her books, among them Thinking in Pictures, The Autistic Brain, and Visual Thinking, sit alongside more than fifty years of peer-reviewed research on animal behavior and livestock welfare, which is a range of output that most academic careers do not attempt, let alone sustain.

The practical evidence of her way of seeing is everywhere in American agriculture. Roughly half the cattle in the United States move through handling facilities she designed, systems that came out of her noticing details that everyone standing in the same pen had somehow walked past. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, has been named one of the top ten college professors in the country, received the Dole Leadership Prize, and was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning HBO film about her life.

A Mind That Works Differently Notices Different Things

What makes her work matter to a conversation about artificial intelligence is not that she has predictions about the technology. It is that she has spent fifty years demonstrating, in concrete and measurable ways, that a mind operating outside the norm will catch what a room full of conventional thinkers has missed, and that the value of that catch only becomes obvious afterward.

The question is no longer what the machines can do. It is what remains distinctly, usefully human about the way any particular person thinks.

That is the question the Summit is built around, and there is something fitting about asking it with Temple on a working cattle ranch, in a landscape that has shaped so much of her thinking about attention, perception, and design.

At the Summit

Dr. Grandin will open a larger conversation about intelligence, perception, empathy, and the human responsibility to design systems that improve lives. She will also sit for a fireside conversation with José Velasco, who has known and worked alongside her for years.