Last month, during the New York International Auto Show, I hosted a press breakfast to kick off Messe Frankfurt’s forthcoming “Connected Mobility” event series. (Messe Frankfurt produces both the Frankfurt Auto Show and the Automechanika shows for the automotive aftermarket.) In addition to my opening remarks, we were fortunate to have AutonomouStuff’s chief learning officer Guy Fraker deliver a short keynote, followed by presentations and a panel discussion with RideScout CEO Joseph Kopser and Dash CTO Brian Langel. Here’s my recap of the event:

The speakers approached the impending arrival of autonomous vehicles from a number of perspectives. Moderator Greg Lindsay began his presentation by underscoring the fact that autonomous cars are not a new idea; they were introduced by General Motors in its “Futurama” pavilion at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair. He also listed the trends in mobility shaping the development of autonomous vehicles – including car-sharing, ride-sharing, and “mobility-as-a-service” – and concluded by asking whether the introduction of autonomous features will lead to radical changes in vehicle design, perhaps to the point where they resemble buildings. Keynote speaker Guy Fraker drew parallels between the present and the automotive industry of a century ago, when a confluence of vehicle design, the invention of the assembly line, and the advent of widespread consumer credit made the creation, production, and purchase of millions of automobiles possible. He asked what it will take to create such a moment again, when autonomous vehicles have the potential to upend traditional insurance, tap millions of elderly or disabled potential buyers who cannot legally drive a car themselves, and transform what it means to go from A to B. “We have to decide we want from mobility,” he said. “Because right now, we have the technology to build it.” RideScout CEO Joseph Kopser followed Fraker, arguing we will one day purchase “mobility plans” just as we sign contracts with mobile telephony carrier today. And Dash co-founder and CTO Brian Langel concluded the presentation portion of the program by exploring the implications of the “automotive graph,” i.e. how our attitudes toward our vehicles will change when their performance is easily understood and accessible from our phones.

My friend John McDermott quotes me in his story for MEL about the scourge of wearing headphones at work:

Greg Lindsay – author of the forthcoming book Engineering Serendipity about designing spaces and cities that encourage innovation – blames the “headphones at work” scourge on the popularity of the open office plan. But now the trend has gone too far, he says. Corporations are using the cachet of an open office as an excuse to cut costs and cram everyone into a confined space “regardless of role, function or work style. In many cases, there’s not much nuance to it.”

Indeed, “the amount of space per employee shrank from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010,” Susan Cain writes in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. The results, according to Lindsay: “Headphones are the new cubicle walls” – a signal the wearer isn’t to be disturbed. And they might be a necessity for introverts, who might feel particularly challenged by a noisy, open-planned office, as demonstrated by the famous “Geen study” Cain references in her book.

In 1984, researchers at the University of Missouri (led by Russell G. Green), challenged a group of extroverts and introverts to learn the rules of a word game while wearing “headphones that emitted random bursts of noise.” When asked to adjust the noise to a level that was “just right” for them, the extroverts chose a noise level almost 20 decibels higher than the introverts (and ended up playing the game equally well). But when the introverts and extroverts switched noise levels, both groups underperformed, but especially the introverts.

Rather than just give everyone their own pair of noise-canceling headphones to curate the audio environment that works for them, a better, more collaborative solution is to design an office that includes different environments with specific functions – for casual collaboration, an open floor with rows of desks; soundproof conference rooms for small group meetings; and private nooks for intense solo work.

Or your colleagues can find the right balance between productive chitchat and being annoying AF.

“The real answer is an office culture where people don’t feel compelled to annoy you at any moment, so you keep the headphones off,” Lindsay says.

It’s not an April Fools’ joke. Interbrand’s news arm, Brandchannel, has an interview with me following my talk at the agency back in January. I’ll skip editor Shirley Brady’s introduction and repost the Q&A here:

Greg, what can smaller, newly emerging cities learn from larger, established cities?

It’s worth noting at the start that the world has only really begun to urbanize. Urban populations are expected to double between 2010 and 2050 thanks to population growth and migration, and urban land cover – the ground beneath our feet – is expected to triple during that time. So we can expect wild profusions of cities, most of which will look more like Shenzhen than Charlotte – skyscrapers sprouting next to villages next to empty fields next to slums.

The most important thing these emerging cities can learn from London or New York or Tokyo is to resist the urge to wipe the ground clean and build gated cities that look great in renderings but are sterile in real life. New York’s Little Italy and Nolita were slums a century ago; Tokyo was bombed flat after World War II. Both were rebuilt by many hands with the freedom to make what they wanted. If brandchannel’s readers really want to win the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” or the loyalty of the emerging middle class, they should forget about Shanghai and Dubai and focus on the needs of people in Dharavi and Kibera – sponsor the infrastructure they need to become the cities they should be.

Your talk focused on optimizing cities, office design and connected mobility. How do these three areas connect when imagining the future of urbanization?

Cities thrive from intensity – both the creative intensity of residents and the intense use of infrastructure. So when it comes to the future of work and the future of mobility, I’m interested in how we can steer cities and society away from sterile, singular uses – the office, the car, the suburb, the mall – toward fluid, more intense ones. That’s why I’m a big proponent not only of coworking (which has entered the mainstream with WeWork’s eye-opening $10 billion–and more recently, $16 billion–valuation), but any development that leads away from conventional commercial real estate toward more publicly mixed uses.

The same thing goes for mobility. The near-term goal for urban mobility shouldn’t be cycling lanes, autonomous cars, or Uber, but a “mobility-as-a-service” platform combining every mode to make transport easier and more accessible. I guess the question is: how do you bring the most people – and the most diverse set of people – to the same place at the same time? Because as a century’s worth of urban sociology and economics tells us, that’s when the magic happens.

Which brands do you see playing the largest role in New Cities’ Connected Mobility Initiative?

Well, Toyota, obviously – the initiative is underwritten by the Toyota Mobility Foundation. The two brands looming largest in my research – as seemingly unstoppable forces, if not the villains – are Google and Uber.

Google, of course, reintroduced the notion of autonomous cars five years ago as if no one had ever thought of them before outside The Jetsons. But General Motors had first broached the idea at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair within its Futurama exhibit (the most successful design fiction exercise of all time, I should add), and robotics researchers were making headway on the idea before Google seeming hired them all. But thanks to the company’s heft, success, and halo around the future, the company has come to be seen as synonymous with autonomous cars, and that’s not the case as automakers race to write their own software and introduce their own models. But Daimler’s Dieter Zetsche is right to be wary about the combination of Google’s market share and mind share.

As for Uber, I think it’s to urban mobility what Walmart famously was to retailing – a deceptively cheaper, easier, friendlier alternative to small, local players, that has stoked a consumer backlash against taxis and used it (along with a deceptively large lobbying operation) to rewrite legislation, giving it the ability to build a parallel transportation that threatens to create a two-tiered system in which people who ride transit are second-class citizens with second-class options. (Just look at what Walmart has done to small towns across America when it comes to retailing options.) Whether they know it or not, transit agencies are in a fight to the death, and they can’t win by digging in their heels. They’re going to have to innovate and rebrand themselves if they hope to survive.

What’s an emerging technology trend that you believe is actually working against human connection?

I always tell this story: I met my wife in 2003 after crashing a party. I was early to meet friends at the bar next door, and rather than stand at the bar, nursing a beer and looking lonely, I decided to crash. If today’s smartphones and social networks had existed then, it’s likely I never would have met here – I’d still be standing at the bar, toggling between Twitter and Tinder. We’ve been extraordinarily successful at building social networks that link us to others around the globe, but we’ve done a terrible job at creating them for local contexts. I think two of Tinder’s competitors – Hinge and Happn – are interesting starts, but we have far to go.

If you had to choose brands to start a new city on Mars, which would you choose and why?

I’d start by asking Weyland-Yutani Corporation (from the Alien franchise) to recruit colonists; they’re not afraid to innovate in hostile environments. I’d also sign up (Blade Runner‘s) Tyrell Corporation to staff the menial jobs. I just connected on LinkedIn with their new training coordinator, Roy Batty; he’s great. Although given what happened when Elon Musk decided to give drivers sort of-self-driving cars, maybe not Tesla.

Update: Thursday’s event at the Atlantic Council was broadcast live by C-SPAN. I can’t seem to embed the clip, but you can watch our entire discussion here.

I’m headed to Washington D.C. this morning to discuss “Smart Homes and the Internet of Things,” a new paper published by the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security in conjunction with the cybersecurity experts at I Am The Cavalry. You can watch us live at 4 PM EDT, and presumably archived thereafter. (I’m a non-resident senior fellow at the Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative and the lead author of the paper.)

The brief explores the broken promises, unrealized promise, and perverse consequences of “smart homes” ranging from the Internet-of-Fridges first mooted almost twenty years ago to such contemporary devices as Nest’s smart thermostat and Tesla’s Powerwall. Although the paper overall isn’t quite as critical as I’d like, I am rather proud of a section imagining life in a hacked, “haunted” house circa 2025, with obvious inspiration from Bruce Sterling’s The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things, Scott Smith’s Thingclash, Tobias Revell’s and Natalie Kane’s Haunted Machines, Matt Honan’s “Nightmare on Connected Home Street,” and Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, just to name a few. Here’s an excerpt:

For more than a month now, my house has been haunted. There’s nothing supernatural about it; there are more than 15 million homes infected with the H@untedM@nsion worm, BuzzCNN reported yesterday. Every morning between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.–never the same time twice–my bedroom lights begin to strobe, and Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” kicks in again. I would replace the smart lightbulbs (which were the hackers’ initial entry point into my smart home) with dumb ones, but then I’d lose the tax credits.

Fortunately, I sleep on the floor of my Amazon Prime kitchen, which hasn’t interacted with my Microsoft bedroom since the acquisition talks broke down in 2019. It’s annoying when I ask for the weather report and both Alexa and Cortana talk over each other trying to answer. Even with my circadian rhythms shattered by the cacophony upstairs, Alexa knows me well enough to have started the coffee ten minutes ago.

I wish she had stocked the fridge with milk, however. I haven’t had dairy in months, after hackers took advantage of my flirtation with the paleo diet to tweak Amazon’s predictive ordering routine to have racks of lamb and other big-ticket meats delivered. They ship them to me through their referral code; this earns them pennies but costs me a lot more. If I give them away or throw them out, more arrive automatically. All I can do is let them rot in the fridge, pitting the algorithm’s learning function against its zombie programming.

While the coffee brews, I take a shower. As part of the haunting, my security camera ritualistically snaps a photo while I’m au naturel. When the haunting started, the first picture was accompanied by an automated email threatening to post my less-than-paleo physique to my Facebook account daily, unless I paid up – 300 μBTC, or about $20 US, to their bitcoin wallet.

There isn’t sufficient power for me to work from home today. A 2022 Supreme Court decision granted power utilities the right to requisition stored electricity in my Tesla Powerwall during “periods of emergency” (i.e., summer), so by around noon I won’t have enough power to both charge the car and run the smart lights. And I’ll have to get back before 7 p.m., when the power normally comes back on. AT&T Cisco’s Smart+ Connected Collection service has started refusing to unlock the door without a pro-rated daily payment to cover the utility bill. It’s a good thing I never upgraded the door to the garage, so I can still hack its Bluetooth lock and sneak into my smart home.

Now you see why I don’t write fiction.

Global Real Estate Insight asked me what their readers need to know about the future of cities. This is what I told them.

1. The world is fully urbanised already.
You just haven’t noticed. It has become trendy in recent years to say the world is half-urbanised because more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. But given the water, energy, data, food, and transport infrastructure required to make this state of affairs possible, the remaining half more or less exists to serve the needs of city-dwellers. We have transformed the world’s rural landscape into a network of highways, dams, farms, feedlots, oilfields and data centres that are helpfully out of sight.

2. Slums are the cities of the future.
Help them, don’t bulldoze them. The planet’s urban population is expected to double between 2005 and 2050 to more than 7bn people. But urban land cover is expected to triple during that time, which means we are poised to cover more of the planet in the next 30 years than in all of human history. Most of that will consist of informal settlements and slums. Our great urban challenge will not be building gleaming new cities from scratch, but giving these people the rights and the means to gradually transform these places into world-class cities in their own right, just as Dickensian London and Gangs of New York-era Manhattan grew into the world-class cities they are today.

3. Mobility is destiny.
The shape of cities is defined by the state-of-the-art in transportation at the time of their construction. The layouts of Jerusalem, Venice, London, and Los Angeles each respectively bear witness to this. Arguably, the state-of-the-art today is the smartphone, which enables its owner to seamlessly locate, understand, and pay for multiple modes, while empowering transportation providers in ways that have never existed. The rise of Uber and its rivals has already changed how people perceive and use cities – with small but significant impacts on real estate prices. Google is already thinking long and hard about how autonomous cars might do the same. Mobile devices, urban mobility, and social mobility have all become entwined.

4. “Old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.”
That is the future, according to science fiction author Bruce Sterling. And he is not wrong. The combination of mega-urbanisation, longer life expectancies, and climate change will have far-reaching, often disastrous effects on cities, especially if we fail to develop new models for developing, deploying, and financing new infrastructure. Solar panels on every rooftop and Tesla batteries in every basement sound great, but who is going to pay for them after a hurricane or typhoon has ravaged New York or Manila yet again?

5. Cities are ultimately good for you.
Physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt have made waves arguing that cities grow stronger, faster and better the bigger they get – roughly an extra 15% better every time they double in size. They have measured this increase in patents, wages, productivity and whatever else they can find data for. Clearly, this is not true for every city – maybe not for Lagos, definitely for London. West and Bettencourt argue this disparity has to do with cities’ ability to bring large, dense, diverse concentrations of people together in space and time. The Tube does that; Lagos’ traffic does not. The continued growth of London is a good thing, but only if it continues investing in necessary infrastructure and commits to granting all of its residents the right to use the city. The future has never belonged to ghost towns, gilded or otherwise.

Last week, I had the honor of delivering the first talk in this year’s World Changing Speaker Series at Interbrand – the brand consulting behemoth responsible for the identities of Microsoft, Samsung, Nissan, and Xerox, among others (at least according to its Wikipedia page). At the invitation of Danny Robertson and Natalie Silverstein, I held forth at top speed for an hour on the future of cities, travel, tourism, mobility, work, and social networks. I was stunned and gratified at how many of their colleagues stuck around to listen on the eve of a blizzard. Thanks again for having me.

Look Ahead – an online publication sponsored by General Electric and produced by The Economist Group – recently asked me what will be the greatest challenges most engineers will face in 2050. My response:

Call me a pessimist, but I believe engineers will be in a race against time and climate change to replace destroyed and failing 20th-century infrastructure–roads, power lines, pipelines, etc–with new technologies, materials and networks out of necessity.

Hurricane Sandy in 2012 not only exposed the weaknesses of America’s coastal infrastructure, but also the inability of local governments to afford replacements in the face of increasingly frequent storms. Meanwhile, the back-to-back-to-back typhoons Pablo, Yolanda and Glenda in the Philippines exposed just how difficult it will be for developing nations to physically rebuild ahead of the next storm.

The greatest challenge for engineers will be developing and deploying more resilient solutions at scale, whether that be solar micro-grids, new transportation alternatives and, (hopefully), cheap, transformative infrastructure that hasn’t been invented yet.

Please click through for further thoughts from luminaries at GE, the Institute for the Future, and more.

Way back in September, I kicked off the annual conference of the Automotive Fleet & Leasing Association with stories about four possible futures of autonomous cars – a Google utopia, dystopian gridlock, coping with catastrophic climate change, and just-in-time delivery bots. The video of that talk has finally been posted, which I encourage you to watch by clicking here. (Privacy settings forbid me from embedding it above.) Fast-forward to the 11:00 mark to skip the throat-clearing remarks. Enjoy.

I’m honored to be featured in “The Changing World of Work,” a series of videos produced by Microsoft Office Envisioning and PopTech. From the introductory blurb:

The world of work is changing. On the one hand we have incredibly high levels of worker disengagement and there are dire predictions that up to 50 percent of the jobs in the United States are at risk of automation in the next two decades, but on the other hand we have new companies creating value faster than at any point in human history, and we can all feel the potential. The closer we looked, the more we realized that the way we work has not kept up with the rapid pace of change in the world. To understand what was happening, PopTech and Microsoft Office Envisioning spoke to experts on the subject from around the world. Join us on our journey of discovery.

I appear in the video above, “The Social Workplace,” along with my Harvard Business Review co-authors Ben Waber and Jennifer Magnolfi. You can find the entire series here.

Revolution of the Present, a documentary directed by Marc Lafia and starring such notable thinkers as Saskia Sassen, Doug Rushkoff, Manuel De Landa, Michael Hardt (and well, me) hits the Internet for free next week on Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Vimeo – I tried embedding it above, but you’ll just have to click through to watch. What is Revolution of the Present about? I’m glad you asked:

Humanity seems to be stuck in the perpetual now that is our networked world. More countries are witnessing people taking to the streets in search of answers. Revolution of the Present, the film, features interviews with thought leaders designed to give meaning to our present and precarious condition. This historic journey allows us to us re-think our presumptions and narratives about the individual and society, the local and global, our politics and technology. This documentary analyzes why the opportunity to augment the scope of human action has become so atomized and diminished. Revolution of the Present is an invitation to join the conversation and help contribute to our collective understanding.

As Saskia Sassen, the renowned sociologist, states at the outset of the film, ‘we live in a time of unsettlement, so much so that we are even questioning the notion of the global, which is healthy.’ One could say that our film raises more questions than it answers, but this is our goal. Asking the right questions and going back to beginnings may be the very thing we need to do to understand the present, and to move forward from it with a healthy skepticism.

Revolution of the Present is structured as an engaging dinner conversation, there is no narrator telling you what to think, it is not a film of fear of the end time or accusation, it is an invitation to sit at the table and join an in depth conversation about our diverse and plural world.

I’m the one at the dinner table ranting about the Brand Called You. Bon appetit.