Johannes Castner works for several consultancies in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning (ML) and Human-Centered Ethical AI as an important sense of collective intelligence. Johannes pivoted CollectiWise as his consultancy around collective intelligence and the Capability Sensitive Design framework for AI. 
Your WHY 
As a descendant of European Jews as well as Germans, growing up in Germany, I grew up in the shadow of a particularly evil dystopian episode that we are all too familiar with. This episode of history and the great hopes of mostly secular Jewish social and reform thinkers from the 19th and early 20th centuries Germany are the building blocks of my why. We need to consciously build our society towards a utopia of our own making or we will end up being manipulated and stripped of our human dignity. 
Your Background 
My life story is hard to believe if I hadn’t lived it myself; I went from being a social outcast of sorts in Austria (having been raised in Northern Germany but moved to Vienna as a 12-year-old boy) to being the world’s happiest homeless camper in Los Angeles, to being an Ivy League student graduating magna cum laude from Columbia University in economics and cultural anthropology to working at the Federal Reserve Bank to working in Silicon Valley. All of it is part of a series of ethnographic studies in a way. This is, of course, a very crude bird's eye view of my past life that only is meant to serve as a backdrop for what I’m doing now: I’m a freelance consultant as a machine learning engineer and data scientist.
Growing up and Moving On
When I was 6, I was sent to a dormitory in Austria for troubled kids. I had no education for the six years I was there. My mother took me out of there when I was 12 to Vienna. She homeschooled me in the manner of Summerhill schools in the US. When I was 14, I became an apprentice as a stonemason. I wanted to go to the US so I flipped a coin to choose between New York and Los Angeles. Los Angeles won.  
I came to the US as a 19-year-old boy seeking the adventure of a lifetime, and I was not disappointed. I hardly spoke English at the time, and I ended up homeless for some time; the happiest homeless person in America or the world, I believe. After singing in a band and acting in various independent movies as well as being a small-time actor in various TV shows you might have watched for about 5 years. 
Your Education
I started studying at Santa Monica College where I took up cultural anthropology and eventually went to Columbia University graduating with a degree in economics. I became a research assistant to the economist Chris Foote at the Federal...