What if The Bar Traveled to you? Cities and Mobility of Tomorrow.
With Greg Lindsay
Most of us like to think about what the world will look like in the future. Greg Lindsay makes a career out of it. Whether it is working with faculty and cadets at West Point to create comics mimicking futurist scenarios, or speaking to large audiences in the meat industry to predict how changing habits will affect the market, Greg has insights about it all. Greg came to Cornell Tech After Hours to focus on shifting trends in mobility and how our cities are changing. He gave an incredible lesson on how technology and socioeconomics will combine to shape our world.
It is terribly difficult to predict what the future of mobility will look like. Greg likes to look into the past to see how these trends begin to shape. When the segway first hit the scene, it seemed like a tool reserved for tourists and mall cops. But now that micro-mobility is beginning to take the mainstage, technologies deriving from the segway are gaining ground. What was once thought of as a novelty is now considered a major influence of our multimodal future.
Greg connects trends shaping our cities to both changing technology and changing habit. He is leading a push to understand how current climate will shape millennial decision making as the generation begins to raise families and settle down. One of the most important factors that will make communities desirable is walkability… an elegant and non-tech solution for a technologist to focus on. Greg backs this up with fantastic research and real estate data.
These trends will dictate both community development as well as businesses. Greg mentioned predictions by Astro Teller about how buildings are going to be flexible and re-configurable. Just like self-driving cars, buildings and business may shape, morph, and transport in order to fit consumer needs. Storefronts will be more and more devoted to services while furniture, hardware, and book stores are on their way out.
As our built environment morphs, Greg paints an incredible picture of what our cities and services will be able to offer. In the face of self-driving school buses, bus drivers will turn into tutors and play facilitators. While robots begin to deliver our packages, mail workers will turn into last mile porters. Looking to stay in the neighborhood on a Friday night? Bars and Supermarkets and drive to you!
While some futurists are bleak and dystopian, Greg paints the future as endless and bright. He travels around acting as an advisor, speaker, and writer. We may not know how automation and robotics will shape the way we live and work. But if many of Greg’s predictions come true, then our ability to move, build, should make us all very optimistic.
After Hours is a Cornell Tech alumni run event where we host industry leaders at the coolest NYC (and as of recently, SF) venues we can find. Interested in speaking? Know of a great space to host? Kind enough to sponsor an event? 🙏
