I’m thrilled and honored to be among the dozens of visionaries and critics quoted in Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Research Center’s new report on the future of human agency in a world of ubiquitous AI. Considering the rapid advances — and all-too-obvious lack of oversight — when it comes to large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, this report could not have arrived at a better time.

I’m batting ninth in a murderer’s row including Douglas Rushkoff, Devin Fidler, danah boyd, Jamais Cascio, Paul Saffo, and Ben Waber — and those are just the people I happen to know! — but I’m happy to share my contributions nonetheless:

“Humans will be out of the loop of many important decisions by 2035, but they shouldn’t be. And the reasons will have less to do with the evolution of the technology than politics, both big and small. For example, given current technological trajectories, we see a bias toward large, unsupervised models such as GPT-3 or DALL-E 2 trained on datasets riddled with cognitive and discriminatory biases using largely unsupervised methods. This produces results that can sometimes feel like magic (or ‘sapience,’ as one Google engineer has insisted) but will more often than not produce results that can’t be queried or audited.

“I expect to see an acceleration of automated decision-making in any area where the politics of such a decision are contentious – areas where hard-coding and obscuring the apparatus are useful to those with power and deployed on those who do not.

“In the face of seemingly superior results and magical outcomes – e.g., an algorithm trained on historical crime rates to ‘predict’ future crimes – will be unthinkingly embraced by the powers that be. Why? First, because the results of automated decision-making along these lines will preserve the current priorities and prerogatives of institutions and the elites who benefit from them. A ‘pre-crime’ system built on the algorithm described above and employed by police departments will not only post outcomes ad infinitum, it will be useful for police to do so. Second, removing decisions from human hands and placing them under the authority of ‘the algorithm,’ it will only make it that much more difficult to question and challenge the underlying premises of the decisions being made.”

Read the whole report here.

On February 21, our partners at Open House New York hosted a special public programming session for The Metaverse Metropolis titled The Augmented City: Technologies for Civic Engagement starring inCitu founder and CEO Dana Chermesh and SHoP Architects founding principal Chris Sharples. Watch the video above! Session description and panelist bios are below.

Have you stepped into the Metaverse yet? You may not need to as the Metaverse is coming to you. Emerging technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) promise to untether the internet from our phones and computers and virtually layer it over the city itself. This offers us opportunities to access New York, and what it can be, in innovative—and more inclusive—ways. From virtually experiencing New Year’s Eve in Times Square to visualizing possibilities for a relocated Madison Square Garden, augmented reality provides new tools to help New Yorkers “see” and engage with a constantly changing urban landscape. Join Open House New York and the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech for a probing conversation about how AR and VR can be harnessed for good.

Dana Chermesh-Reshef (Founder & CEO, inCitu) is an architect, a former F15 flight simulator trainer from the Israeli Air Force turned urban data scientist (NYU CUSP ’18). In 2020, Dana was selected to become an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Schmidt Futures, the public benefit arm of Eric Schmidt, under which she founded inCitu: a startup on the mission to bring future cities to life via augmented reality to foster greater collaboration around the process of urban change. Prior to becoming an EIR Dana worked at the NYC Department of City Planning (DCP), her research on the feasibility of Tel-Aviv’s city center rezoning was published in “Haaretz” newspaper and she is a frequent lecturer on Smart Cities’ next frontier.

Christopher Sharples, AIA is a founding principal of SHoP. He is an advocate for new practices that advance sustainability, equity and inclusion with more than 30 years of industry leadership in design and master planning, working in complex urban contexts. Christopher has led many definitive SHoP projects, including Essex Crossing in New York, the recently completed Uber Headquarters in San Francisco, Uber Air in Los Angeles, the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and several U.S. Embassies through the Design Excellence contract with the State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Building Operations. His priority in SHoP tech development and process innovation is to accelerate workflow and elevate opportunities for efficiency, resilience and collaboration. In 2018 he cofounded Assembly OSM, delivering world-class architecture through an advanced process of digital design, manufacturing, assembly and onsite installation. He has taught, lectured, exhibited and been published frequently and internationally.

As part of The Metaverse Metropolis initiative at Cornell Tech, I’m moderating a session at this year’s Augmented World Expo on “The Augmented City,” starring inCitu founder and CEO Dana Chermesh, Snap’s public policy manager Jasson Crockett, and Washington D.C.‘s interim Department of Buildings chief Ernest Chrappah. Here’s what you can expect:

As American cities struggle to build housing, improve transit, and otherwise convince a skeptical public that change is good - and necessary! — how can AR help win over their critics? This panel will bring together a startup (inCitu) and platform (Snap) engaging the public at massive scale through offering passerby a glimpse of new projects in their actual context. They’ll be joined by a city official to discuss the potential of AR to deliver services, fast-track development, and re-imagine our relationship with the built environment at large.

Register here to join us!

The International Republican Institute — founded in 1983 to “link people with their governments, guide politicians to be responsive to citizens, and motivate people to engage in the political process” outside the United States — recently published an “Anthology for a Future of Tech-Enabled Democracy” in partnership with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).

As part of this effort, I was commissioned along with Arizona State University futurist Brian David Johnson and acclaimed science-fiction author Madeline Ashby to contribute short stories inspired by the former’s “threatcasting” methodology. My fledgling attempt at fiction, “El Libertador” is published below, along with a short introduction by IRI. I hope you enjoy.

*

Across Latin America, “colectivos truchos” refer to the informal buses that are both a nuisance for elected officials and a necessity for millions of inhabitants who cannot afford a private car or access public transportation. They are a symbol for the ordinary people made outlaws for the crime of being stuck outside the official system. This story tells the tale of two different realities: one where technology is used to oppress and marginalize vulnerable refugees, to the benefit of the state, and another where the same technology is applied to lift refugees up, to provide public services and legal status. As you read the story, remember that technology itself can be neutral. How it’s applied is the real determinate of its harm or help. Consider the below as you read the story:

• What responsibility do the creators of these technologies have to build tools that strengthen democracy?

1.
Esperanza wakes with a start. Dead stop. Simply being motionless is enough to shock her awake, given how rare it is. By now, she’s used to being lulled to sleep by Javier, her neighbor, their driver, their leader, and the gentle lurch of their colectivo trucho through Buenos Aires’ gridlock, which had been terrible even before the Eye and had only grown worse. The steady tug on her consciousness until passing out reliably shortened the hours-long commute to something more manageable — from her standpoint, at least, if not her family’s. But that shortcut has just been cut short.
She clambers to her feet, half-expecting the worst, but Javier is still at the wheel, looking over from the driver’s seat. “Are you alright?”

“I’m getting there. What is it?” she asks, taking in their surroundings or, at least, their surroundings beyond the bus. The street is dark, lit only by their headlights, the next-closest vehicles, and emergency lights reflected in the sky.

“A checkpoint,” he warily replies.

This is a first. She knows from her neighbors that the southern outskirts are no-go, but she’s been able to avoid them on this route. Are the Nuevo Monteneros even real? she wonders, and not for the first time. Growing up, if it were late enough, her grandfather would scare her with stories of the Monteneros, kidnappers and bank robbers lurking in the barrios of Asunción, first fighting for, and then against Romero, who was an Argentine army general and politician. But nothing makes sense now that the lie is circulating that she and her neighbors, fellow refugees, supposedly want to overthrow the government. We’re here because the Cerrado burned. But the checkpoint was real enough.

The bus starts to shake and sway, breaking her out of her reverie. Javier curses, pounding on the steering wheel. “We’re stuck,” she says, but Javier’s already turned off the bus’s ignition, and the vehicle is silent for the first time in hours.

As she climbs down from the back, she can hear the hum of traffic all around them, and a din from up the street. She listens closer. Something more than that — shouting, chanting.

She pushes her way to the front of the bus, and Javier sees her coming. “They’re not letting us through,” she says.

“How do you know it’s us?” he asks. “Just listen,” she replies. He falls silent, squinting down the darkened street.

The shouting becomes clearer: “¡No pasarán! ¡No pasarán!” “They shall not pass!”

The rifles and armored vehicles don’t scare her, but the scanners do. Her face. The Eye. El ojo que ve a través de ti, “the eye that sees through you,” the facial recognition necessary to root out the Nuevo Monteneros, or so they’d been told.

She has no reason to be afraid, but she also has no standing to not be afraid. The column of colectivos truchos waits, boxed in, while cars creep forward on both sides.

“Stay behind me,” Javier says. “If anyone asks about your status, give them this,” he adds, adjusting his mirrored sunglasses. “I’ll tell them we’re a team.”

“You seem prepared,” she says.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve been stopped,” he replies.

“No, but never like this. You’re acting like you’ve done this before,” she says.

Javier hesitates. “I have,” he finally says.

Of course. It wasn’t the first time. The government, with its scanners, its checkpoints, and its guns, must have stopped the bus before. She shouldn’t be surprised, but she is. “Who’s driving when they do?” she asks. “Do you stop the bus?”

“I do,” Javier says.

“So you’ve already gone through this.”

“More times than I can count,” he replies.

“What happens then?”

CONTINUED=>

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The Metaverse Metropolis project continues March 21st with a free, in-person event at the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York. “Placemaking Across Realities” will explore how immersive and mixed reality technologies are shaping the future of cities. The event kicks off with a fireside chat between our partners for the event — Spectra Cities and JUMP founder Ryan Rzepecki and Numena CEO Andreea Ion Cojocaru — followed by a panel discussion exploring what urban peacemakers and digital world builders might learn from each other.

Whether you’re in the XR community or just a curious bystander, I hope you’ll join us. Click here to register.

The Metaverse Metropolis — the primary subject of my urban tech fellowship at the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech — officially kicked off on January 24th in partnership with Amsterdam’s Sharing Cities Alliance and New York University’s School of Professional Studies Metaverse Collaborative. Together with the former’s Harmen van Sprang and latter’s Elizabeth Haas, I co-hosted a virtual roundtable drafting a shared manifesto declaring the values, principles, and goals that should guide the development and use of the metaverse in our cities.

The roster of participants hailed from Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Ankara, Atlanta, Austin, Copenhagen, Dublin, Düsseldorf, Eindhoven, Istanbul, Karlstad, Kyiv, London, Montreal, München, New York City, Norwich, Phoenix, Riyadh, Rotterdam, The Hague, Toronto, Utrecht, Washington, DC., and many more.

A final draft of the manifesto will be shared this spring in New York City at a conference hosted by NYU and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. But this is only the beginning.

Over at Climate Alpha, we’ve compiled a ranking and special report on the best places to invest in a future of remote work:

Remote work may be here to stay, but not all “Zoomtowns” are created equal. Many of the pandemic’s most popular refuges have since suffered from housing unaffordability, climate disasters, or both.

Which cities possess the right combination of resilience, quality of life, plentiful housing, and accessibility to a major metro (and points beyond)?

Using Climate Alpha’s proprietary Resilience Index™ scores and forecasting tools, we’ve identified five communities across the U.S. poised to reap the long-term benefits of a remote future, ranging from cities such as Portland, Oregon and Colorado Springs to greener pastures in Michigan, Virginia, and Kentucky.

Click here to download the rest.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazing speakers bureaus — including my Canadian fave, Speakers Spotlight, and my pan-European colleagues at the London Speaker Bureau — but it’s an honor to also join the roster of the Washington Speakers Bureau, which describes itself as “the world’s foremost speakers agency” and isn’t exaggerating, given its deep bench of former heads of state, CEOs, brilliant thinkers… and now me. Please take a look at my profile and topics if you’re in the market for someone who isn’t, say, a former POTUS.

Looking for a speaker who can help you and your organization make sense of the post-post-pandemic landscape? I regularly speak to some of the world’s largest, most influential, and most innovative organizations about the future of cities, climate, AI, the Metaverse, and even the future of the future itself. Below is a list of my current speaking topics; if any pique your interest, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email. After all, there’s no time to think about the future like the present.

The Way We’ll Live Next
Offices are empty. Downtowns are dead. The suburbs are Millennials’ future. At least two of these truisms are wrong, but why? Employees may be grudgingly returning to the office, but work-from-anywhere is here to stay. That doesn’t mean the end of the work week, but new ways and patterns of living and working together closer to home, with more flexible real estate and employment to match. That, in turn, means rethinking who and what cities are for. Forget downtowns versus their suburbs; how can we imagine new uses for old high-rises and new districts to replace dead malls? Because behind the scenes, inflation and technology is quietly turning retail, groceries, and dining inside-out through data, delivery, and automation. And above all looms the threat of climate change and the opportunities of AI and spatial computing to transform the Internet — and the world — as we know it. Drawing on his research and foresight work for Cornell Tech, Climate Alpha, and MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, Greg Lindsay explores the urban and real estate implications of our never-normal landscape and explains why the future will be less remote and more human than you might think.

Autonomous Everything: AI, the Future, and What We Can Do About It
The robots are coming — not to steal your job, but to invent entirely new ones. Advances in automation and artificial intelligence such as GPT-4 and DALL-E point toward an autonomous world in which perception, prediction, and action are embedded in thinking machines. Autonomy will not only transform how and why we work, but also how we think, discover, decide, and deceive ourselves. What we consume — as well as how we produce, transport, and sell it — will take strange new turns as robots increasingly predict, suggest and prepare to help us do it. In this wide-ranging and eye-opening talk on the promise and perils of cutting-edge AI, author and futurist Greg Lindsay explores how autonomy is already upending society, and what we can learn from organizations such as NATO, the U.S. military, and the Secret Service about what to do about it.

The Metaverse Metropolis
“The Metaverse” may be the future, but what is it? While Mark Zuckerberg hopes you’ll never leave your home again, in reality the next generation of the Internet will beckon us outside, into a world in which information is everywhere — if you can see it. Welcome to the real-world metaverse, where you can change reality like changing a channel. How will this then change our relationships with each other and to the world? And how will these “reality channels” transform where we live, how we shop, and how we move through enchanted worlds? Drawing on his “Metaverse Metropolis” project at Cornell Tech, futurist Greg Lindsay offers real advice and lessons from the technologists, designers, and experts building this real-world metaverse.

Where Will You Live in 2050?
Nearly half of Americans were victims of a climate disaster last year — whether fire, floods, heat waves or hurricanes — with insurable losses of more than $100 billion. As people wake up to the realities of climate change — and the growing threat to their homes, livelihoods, and families — many are beginning to ask, “Where should I live someday?” Fortunately, we have answers. Combining climate science with demographics and using artificial intelligence, we can predict tomorrow’s more resilient regions. Climate change isn’t just a story about mounting catastrophes, but also opportunity — if we harness the right technologies, policies, and political will to build back better elsewhere. Drawing on his work with the startup Climate Alpha, Greg Lindsay offers cutting edge analysis and maps to explain why and where a warming world may still have shelter for us all. 

Everybody for Themselves: How to Work, Together
After two years apart, Americans have forgotten how to work together. This is evident in the ongoing tug-of-war over the office. This framing — are we better off alone or in-person? — has dominated debates about our post-pandemic destiny. But neither managers nor workers have stopped to ask what it means to be together, whom we should be together with, and how we can be together. If the overnight adoption of remote work proved many of us can work from virtually anywhere, with anyone, what’s stopping us from taking it a step further and working with, well, everyone? Because solving the challenges that lie ahead of us on the far side of the pandemic requires working together at a scale greater than any one government or company ever has. In this far-reaching new talk, Greg Lindsay explores new ways of being and working together in a world in which corporate silos have cracked open and frustrated employees have spilled out, desperate to reconnect. Drawing upon dozens of post-pandemic examples as well as his own web3 experiments in building a distributed autonomous organization, or DAO, he offers audiences a vision of what it means to be together — how, why, and with whom — very soon.

Where the Robot Meets the Road
A decade ago, self-driving cars were science fiction leftover from The Jetsons. Today, Google and Tesla are leading a breakneck autonomous arms race, as the global auto industry races to build electric AVs at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. But a self-driving SUV may prove to be the horseless carriage of autonomy — rapidly eclipsed by new species of self-driving scooters, deliverybots, and buildings with a mind of their own. How are these technologies already transforming the way we see, understand, and get around cities? How have they helped China, Japan, and Korea mitigate the worst effects of the coronavirus lockdown? What effects will they have on where we live, work and play, and what are the opportunities and threats for automakers, technology firms, public transit, employers, and developers? Drawing upon his work with BMW, Intel, MIT, the Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Aspen Institute, and NewCities, Greg Lindsay offers a tour of future urban mobility and how they promise to transform our cities in the coming decades.

The Future of the Future
The future isn’t what it used to be. As the pace of social, technological, and environmental change accelerates, organizations are struggling just to make sense of the present, let alone spot threats and opportunities looming just over the horizon. The ability to anticipate, understand, plan for, and innovate around uncertainty has become a critical skill for designers, innovators, and strategists everywhere. As the computing pioneer Alan Kay once said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Futurist, author and NewCities director of applied research Greg Lindsay will teach a crash course in exactly that. The practice of creating futures, or “foresight,” offers a toolkit and framework for detecting signals of change, organizing insights, synthesizing possible futures, identifying potential barriers and opportunities, and designing innovative products, services or ideas that satisfy emerging needs. In addition to lecturing on possible futures, Greg is available to lead participants through a fun, fast-paced workshop in which they create futures of their own.

Engineering Serendipity
How do we bring the right people and the right ideas to the right place at the right time to create something new, when we don’t know who or where or when that is, let alone what we’re looking for? This is the paradox of innovation – new ideas don’t follow org charts or schedule themselves for meetings. Greg Lindsay describes how organizations like Google, the U.S. Military Academy, United Health Group, and the International Red Cross are “engineering serendipity.” They’re harnessing sensors, social networks, and new ways of working to break down the boundaries between new teams, discover new ideas, inspire collaboration and creativity, and to spur employee engagement, learning, and innovation. How, where, and who we work with will never be the same.

The Metaverse Metropolis is a new initiative of the Urban Tech Hub of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Befitting the Hub’s mission to improve people’s lives, train the next generation of urban technologists, and convene cities, companies, and communities to achieve better outcomes, the project aims to build a coalition of municipalities, metaverse builders, designers, legal experts, and citizens to design and deploy industry standards and best practices for public safety in augmented reality environments.

The goal is to define the metaverse equivalent of the traffic light or stop sign — clear, universal signals and infrastructure expressly designed to protect everyone in the public realm, including those in its new virtual dimensions. By starting now and working together to save lives and ground safety at the center of any real-world metaverse, we can begin to lay the foundations for a new generation of computing that is inherently urban.

What do you mean by “the Metaverse,” exactly?

This project is specifically concerned with augmented reality (AR) and “extended” reality (XR), which overlay visuals and information on the physical world through the use of headsets and handheld devices. This differs from virtual reality (VR), which typically aims to create self-enclosed worlds with their own dynamics. For example, Niantic’s Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game, using real world locations and infrastructure as backdrops, while Roblox and Minecraft are proto-metaverses inviting players to create their own virtual spaces in 3D-rendered environments.

Reflecting this divide, AR is sometimes described as “spatial computing” and the “real-world metaverse,” foregrounding the importance of physical world. This is why it’s critical to ensure cities and their inhabitants have a say in the implementation of augmented reality at scale.
 
Why augmented reality? Why now?

Why AR rather than VR? Consider Pokémon Go, which in 2016 briefly became the most popular smartphone app on Earth. Players chasing digital creatures stormed businesses, stampeded through parks, and erased the line between online and off-. Tragically, some chose to play while driving. By one back-of-the-envelope estimate, vehicular crashes caused by Pokémon Go may have killed hundreds and injured tens of thousands of bystanders in its first few months alone. Given a precipitous rise in pedestrian fatalities over the last two years, how do we ensure the real-world metaverse won’t make reality worse?

Why now? Because for more than a decade, cities have suffered from the unintended consequences of disruptive business models designed to wring value from urban space. Whether ride-hailing, short-term rentals, or the “sharing economy” writ large, they have increased congestion, shrank housing supply, and exacerbated inequality in favor of a fortunate few. Only after great effort did public officials learn how to regulate and partner with these startups to share the benefits and burdens of their technologies. As technology giants such as Meta (and perhaps soon, Apple) launch new XR headsets, it’s imperative cities prepare for the implications of a real-world metaverse.

What we hope to achieve

Over the next six months (January-July 2023), the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech will convene a cohort of public officials, partners, and stakeholders to explore the urban implications of widespread augmented reality hardware and software, including issues of public safety, privacy, equity, and more.

During the course of The Metaverse Metropolis, we will engage with standards bodies, industry associations, and practitioner groups such as the Metaverse Standards Forum, Responsible Metaverse Alliance, and XR Guild. While they and others are doing vital work in creating open standards and ethical practices, cities have typically not been participants in these discussions until now.

How you can help

We can’t do this alone — we need your help. We’re actively seeking partners and subject-matter experts to broaden our scope of activities and deepen the discussion next year. We’re specifically seeking partner cities and governments eager to build capacity and begin grappling with these issues now; companies eager to ensure their real-world metaverse is compatible with improving people’s lives; designers, artists, and technologists grappling with new visual languages and wayfinding for an augmented world; and activists determined to not repeat the same mistakes of previous inequitable urban technologies.

We all have a vested interest in ensuring the metaverse is safe and accessible to all — join us today to act on it.