Topics and Audience Takeaways

What Greg Lindsay Talks About:

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 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
THE ROBOTS ARE COMING – not to steal your job, but to invent enti­rely new ones. Recent advances in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence such as Open­AI’s Chat­GPT cou­pled with auto­ma­tion point toward an increa­singly auto­no­mous world in which agen­cy and per­so­na­lity is em­bed­ded in thin­king ma­­chi­nes. Auto­no­my will not only trans­form how and why we work, but also how we think, discover, decide, and even decei­ve our­selves.

What we imagine and produce will take stran­ge new twists and turns as AI increa­singly predict, suggest and convin­ce us do it. In this wide-ranging and eye-opening talk on the promise and perils of AI, 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.

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 asking, “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.