Extreme Intelligence: The Future of Thinking Environments

On May 22, I was fortunate to participate in a wide-ranging panel discussion with UCLA’s Neil Denari and Oblivion and Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski. The panel was part of Extreme IDEAS: Architecture at the Intersection, “a series of programs that chart a dynamic new future for architecture.” The inimitable Alissa Walker recapped the event:

Even though Lindsay’s book Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next seemingly predicts the sprawling, globalized megacities of Kosinski’s fantasy future-world, he thinks it won’t be the Minority Report reality we might envision. American cities, for example, have proven to their citizens that their governments aren’t going to make those massive top-down infrastructural investments in things like PreCrime anymore. More and more, cities are leaving the future to be largely shaped by private companies, a la Google’s Glass and self-driving cars. Which means that urban intelligence, especially those day-to-day interactions with technology, will largely be engineered by the creative people who work for those companies–designers and architects.

Ostensibly a talk about smart cities, instead we wandered into ruminations on science fiction, futurism, and more. Highlights from our talk, including my riffing on my obsession du jour, serendipity, are below.