ideas about the future

source @meiying

It’s hard to imagine the future without imagining cities. Cities are the conceptual home of the future in the human imagination. I’m fascinated by our conceptions of the future, and therefore by our conceptions of the future city. What will the world look like in 50 years? It will look however our cities look.

The fate of humanity is undeniably intertwined with the fate of our cities. Cities are the longest lever by which we can move the future of civilization. How and what to build… that is the great opportunity of my generation.

Most of the great challenges of the 21st century will play out in cities. This is a beautiful thing, because as complex as they are, cities are organisms that we can study and understand. It’s also scary in a way because we can’t control organisms, we can only influence them. But with curiosity, wonder, and courage, we can try to ask questions that expand our understanding and move us forward. Questions won’t necessarily lead us to perfect solutions but they can at least lead us to improvements. And it is admirable to aspire to even small improvements. Still, dream no small dreams, as Goethe would say.

If we take stock of the challenges that will be addressed by humanity over the coming decades, they mainly involve adaptation, managing change, and navigating transitions. We’re in an extremely dynamic and transitional period. Change has always been the only constant, but the rate and magnitude of change today are unprecedented. We are navigating through multiple high-stakes transitions that have profound consequences associated with the outcomes. The majority of these dramas have cities as their stage.

The next 100 years will not be like the last 100 years. The city is no longer the sole domain of governments and professionals like planners, architects, and developers. In the last decade, we’ve seen private technology companies rise to become some of the most influential stakeholders in the built environment. And who is to say that tech companies will be the last great category of change-makers to enter the fray? For now though at least consider how Uber is changing mobility, how Opendoor is changing home-buying, or how Google Maps has and is changing many things. And we’ve only scratched the surface of what will be a Cambrian explosion of innovation. The next 100 years will bring profound disruption to the city.

Cities have historically been slow to change. They have been bureaucratic late adopters of technology. Those characteristics would make any entity vulnerable to disruption. Information technology is permeating every layer of the urban environment. It is tying everything to the pace of change inherent in technological progress. Disruption always brings chaos, but that chaos is usually constrained to one context like a business or an industry. That will not be the case with cities. Since cities are the context and substrate of civilization itself, the disruption and chaos will be broadly unconstrained and highly distributed.

Regulation and government will play a role, but we know how the genie of technological progress behaves. Once the genie is out of the bottle it’s extremely difficult to control. National and international governments will lag further and further behind. Governments were just not built for this situation. Municipal governments may be the only regulatory bodies capable of keeping up with the pace of change. Mayors may eventually become some of the most important decision-makers in government, but that’s a topic for a future post.

Despite the complexity and high stakes, I’m optimistic about the future of cities. I am, therefore, optimistic about the future in general. The challenges we face today and the ones that haven’t yet emerged are daunting, but cities have a stellar track record of resilience. There are and will be solutions. We can and will create them.

The way forward will be led by inspired imaginations. As Elon said

life cannot just be about solving one miserable problem after another, that can’t be the only thing. There need to be things that inspire you, that make you glad to wake up in the morning and be part of humanity.

That’s the ethos of optimism I hold for the future of cities. What exciting visions are we willing to champion? What bold innovations are we willing to bet on? Are we ready to swing for the fences on epic moonshot projects? Dream no small dreams! We are continually building and rebuilding our cities… let’s strive to do it with good taste, and bold ambition.

the urban frontier

Image @NASA

The development business is a beautiful thing. Its ambitions shape cities, and cities enable the brilliance of mankind. Developers are in the city-building business—the human potential enablement business. That business is evolving in a very dynamic way, causing uncertainty and creating new opportunities. In rapidly changing situations, there is utility in reasoning from first principles.

The built environment is a complex, technological system. It is inseperable from the broader patterns of technological progress. Thinking about how technology progresses can prompt insight into how the built environtment evolves.

For most of human history, we were foragers. The economics of foraging was defined by nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes that produced little to no energy surplus. All energy was consumed in the plight to survive. There were no major permanent settlements. All that changed around 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution.

The agricultural revolution was a multi-thousand-year transition period that introduced the agricultural age. Think of the agricultural age as a roughly ten-thousand-year economic supercycle. Agricultural land use generated a small energy surplus. This enabled the first significant permanent settlements, and eventually, economic surplus and trade growth.

Agricultural economies grew and evolved very slowly for thousands of years, until the 18th century, when the pattern was disrupted. The Industrial Revolution was the first major period of economic transition. It marked the end of the agricultural age and the start of the industrial age. Think of the industrial age as the second economic supercycle. Industry 1.0 technologies (steam power, mechanization, and ironworks) ushered in a new economic paradigm driven by industrial technologies. The agricultural economy continued to grow, but the prime mover of economic value creation shifted from agriculture to industry.

Roughly a century after industry 1.0 moved the economy into the industrial age, industry 2.0 technologies (electricity, telecommunications, and steelworks) intensified industrial development. The next fundamental shift, however, arrived in the mid-20th century with the computer revolution.

Industry 3.0 technologies (computing, networks, and electronics) marked the end of the industrial age, and the beginning of the information age—the third economic supercycle. The agrarian and industrial economies continued to grow, but information became the prime mover of economic value creation. Information technologies integrated agriculture and industry and created a new global information economy.

Now, we are in the midst of another transition period. The fourth economic supercycle is beginning.

This is one interpretation of the pattern. Each revolution adds to the energy surplus of civilization, enabling a new layer of technology-driven economic growth on top of the existing economy. Each revolution shifts civilization into a new economic supercycle, the total economic pie grows substantially, and the new paradigm fundamentally redefines how people live.

On average, civilization is better off with each revolution. The paradigm shifts, however, are destabilizing. They cause chaos and introduce novel risks that existing firms and individuals are not always well-equipped to mitigate. Some firms from the previous cycle ultimately fail, and some people lose their jobs. This is creative destruction.

Despite the pattern, it’s very difficult to make any predictions in this space; technology and the economy are chemistries of infinitely recursive, complex adaptive systems.

Complexity aside, it’s not unreasonable to posit that we are on the cusp of the next economic supercycle. What that supercycle may look like is a separate topic. For now, it’s just worth pointing out that due to the increasing pace of technological innovation, this transition period is likely to be more disruptive than the computer revolution that brought on the information age.

The coming era is likely to be extremely dynamic for the built environment. There is constructive interference beteen the waves of industry 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0. The possibilities this implies for new appraoches to development are many. New domains will open.

Progress in augmented reality will enable the extension of finite physical built space into infinite digital space. The resulting spatial experience will be a seamless integration between the built environment and the internet. Progress in virtual reality will enable entirely new spatial environments. These changes may unlock new captial market dynamics for virtual space built on cryptonomics.

Progress in material science, engineering, and architecture will enable super-high-performance structures. Progress in robotics and advanced fabrication will fundamentally retool the construction industry. This technical progress will catalyze experimental new jurisdictions — first in existing cities, then in startup cities, and eventually, off-world.

This physical/digital, on-world/off-world spatial environment is the urban frontier.

maps and mental models

Image @NASA

A map is an orientation device. It’s a tool that helps the mind orient to a territory. It can be an approximation of territory in physical space, as with a traditional map, or it can be an approximation of territory in conceptual space, as with a mental model. Whether in the physical case or the conceptual one, maps are a form of structured information designed to help us orient to the territory at hand.

Reality and one’s perception of reality are two distinct things. Maps mediate between us and the objective territory we’re concerned with. They structure raw data to make it useful. I’ve long been curious about this idea. I’m obsessed with trying to understand how people orient themselves in the world. Life is so rich with information and data, how the hell do we make sense of things?

The art and science of cartography can give us some insight into that question. Cartography provides a beautiful analogy for the orienting intelligence of the human mind. Our incredible dexterity with mental models is rooted in cartography. Our capacity to form and use maps and mental models is one of the core aspects of what makes us human, but we engage with it so frequently and instinctually that it often goes unexamined. Here’s a quick story to illustrate this point.

At the height of the Roman Empire, the polymath Claudius Ptolemaeus authored an eight-volume series of atlases and cartographic knowledge titled Geography. The Romans knew the earth was round, and Geography detailed a method of projecting the round planet onto a flat piece of paper. Its maps were the first to overlay the globe with a grid system, an innovation that is still used today.

As the Roman Empire declined some three hundred years after Geography was written, the book was lost. Then, almost a thousand years later, it was rediscovered by scholars in Constantinople. Soon after, the invention of the printing press made rare books a symbol of wealth, and Geography became a best seller amongst the European elite.

In the 14th century, an Italian navigator examined Geography’s map of the world and concluded that Asia could be reached by sailing west from Spain. This man was Christopher Columbus. If Ptolemy’s maps had approximated the terrain more accurately, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain probably wouldn’t have funded the expedition. But we all know how it played out.

Ptolemy’s scrupulous, yet incomplete approximations of reality were given authority in the form of the map he drew. But the map was just a cartographic document. More important was the mental model formed by Columbus and his investors as a result of the flawed map they were using.

This story illustrates the importance of the idea that the map is not the territory- both in the geographic sense and the conceptual sense. The process of mapmaking begins with observation. The cartographer’s capacity to reason and make useful observations mediates between objective reality and subjective approximation of it. That’s the basis of cartography and the basis of our ability to form mental models.

Mapmaking is the art of combining information with aesthetics. Aesthetics and design are just as important as precision and information. In the context of a physical map, that may seem obvious, but in the context of a mental model, it’s equally true and important. Details are generalized and patterns are extrapolated from generalizations. The abstract paraphrases the actual. Each element serves some functional end in alignment with the cartographer’s intention. Or, with consideration of context and scale, elements are cast aside to maintain the clarity that makes the model useful. Observations are made, features are noted, and the model takes form.

Whether forming a map or a mental model, the process works the same way. Aesthetics determine utility. Every mental model has a unique purpose that guides the aesthetic process of observation, generalization, and extrapolation. We need to be able to use the model to organize information- to hang facts on the latticework of theory, as Charlie Munger puts it. One’s aesthetic taste, values, and judgment determine how and where the facts are hung.

There is a long-sought intention in cartography to better model the terrain of the physical world. The collective knowledge contained in geographic maps is ever expanding. From the crude star maps painted in Lascaux cave over 18,000 years ago to the near-infinite complexity of GIS today, time has brought increasing clarity, efficacy, and specificity.

The same could be said of the human pursuit of knowledge. What firmness do we have to stand on as we make our way through a complicated and dangerous world? This is the cartographic domain of mental models; ideas about how to live well, how to problem solve in different contexts, principles that are true across time and space, and principles that are true in the specific domain at hand. Maps help us navigate the world by approximating how the territory is laid out. Mental models help us operate in the world by approximating how things work. They both come about by the same process and serve an analogous conceptual purpose.

Geographic maps and the mental models that we depend on to understand our place in the world have always been interconnected. Each major advancement of the world map has brought a profound shift in humankind’s collective self-perception. One of these cognitive shifts was when people came to widely agree that the Earth is a sphere. That changed our understanding of how to map the geography of the Earth, but more importantly, it changed our mental model of life on this planet. We began to see the finitude of our terrestrial domain. It was a long time between the first observations of this reality and the time when maps would no longer depict the edge of the world, with ships cascading into the unknown.

Another major cognitive shift occurred when people came to widely agree that our sphere was not the center of the universe, as Ptolemy had believed. Heliocentrism is the astronomical model that first placed the Sun at the center of the solar system. This put all our terrestrial geographic maps into a terrifyingly vast cosmic context. No wonder people resisted it. The Catholic Church charged Galileo with heresy, placing him under house arrest for promoting Heliocentrism. It took another 300 years for the church to finally come around. This eventual acceptance marked the start of a long, slow transition from religious to scientific explanations of our world. If we are not the center of the universe, just what the hell is going on, exactly? That question helped birth the scientific age.

The next big shift came as a result of the Apollo Missions to the moon. Seeing the whole earth, hanging in the infinite black abyss of space, was a profound experience for astronauts. Today we call it the overview effect. As Apollo 14 crew member Edgar Mitchell put it after returning from the moon:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch!’

The sight of our pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan famously called it, inspired a major cognitive shift in our collective imagination. A new mental model of humanity. We became culturally aware that we are all “in it together.” There are no political borders from that distance. We’re all just flying through the ether on the starkly singular Spaceship Earth. As Sagan wrote:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

This powerful new mental model is still sinking in. It’s credited with sparking the environmental movement that got going in the ‘60s. It’s driving massive growth in the private space industry. It’s foundational to the explosion of computing and digital information networks. We are getting more interconnected and becoming more aware of our global citizenship.

At their core, these global phenomena are rooted in the cognitive shift that resulted from seeing our planet from afar. Our collective pursuit of a more wholesome cartography of the Earth serves to help us understand our planet and its place in the universe. Similarly, our pursuit of a more effective map of reality serves to help us understand our place in the world. That’s what the 21st century has been about so far, and I think we’re just scratching the surface of what is to come.

These cognitive shifts play out on a global scale over long periods. In a more immediate, practical sense, we are each the cartographers of our minds. Our developmental paths wander and jog towards ever greater efficacy. From the moment we open our eyes as babies, we are forming the features of our maps. We measure the world with our senses as we pass through it and we learn from others by adopting their mental models. We often integrate the mistakes and biases of others through those models, without even knowing it.

Our models of reality are the underlying substrate that gives rise to our thoughts and actions. What we express is the sum of the elements that we have integrated. Our attitudes, thoughts, actions, and beliefs are expressions of our map’s aesthetics. The quality of our decision-making depends on the quality of our observations. We generalize details and identify patterns from generalizations. Features we don’t find useful or don’t like are cast aside for clarity, utility, or comfort. Other features that we don’t intend stubbornly remain, preventing us from seeing things as they are.

Perhaps life has its objective realities, like the terrain of the Earth. Perhaps they are just waiting to be observed, subjectively and imperfectly. This is the ethereal shared domain of science, philosophy, and religion in which many of our most basic mental models are formed. The quality of our maps deeply influences the quality of our experiences.

The challenge is to be an effective cartographer. Update your maps of reality regularly and with humility. Respect the wisdom of the ages; the latticeworks of theory that have been tempered and tested by time have much to teach. Be ambitious and courageous; take risks for the sake of yet-unknown rewards. Those rewards may become the resources that drive the creation of more effective maps in the future. That’s how we push things forward.

Honoring the time-tested mental models of the past, while pushing the limits of what we know, requires that we hold often contradicting models in our minds at the same time. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Those with the courage to explore the unknown are often rewarded with something useful to offer others. It’s natural to feel uncomfortable when people propose bold ideas or attempt bold plans, because these things could be dangerous, but the potential reward is everything implied by the mapping of new territory. Danger in exchange for progress. That is the condition of cartography.