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Listening Audio
I’m a digital cartographer by trade, and honestly, the last two, three, four presentations have been incredible. Maps, historically, they do really two things, and we’ve really seen an amazing amount of the first: understanding our world. But historically, maps weren’t just about understanding. They were also about creating, about building, about shaping the built environment around us. They help us plan cities, do trade, fight wars and maintain peace. And as we’ve digitized these maps, you’ve seen them fit into our pocket. Things that used to take entire libraries, reams of paper, are now in our pocket or in our eyes.But as we move from the information age into the cybernetic age, an era dominated by the application of robotics and artificial intelligence to the physical world, cartography needs to change. It’s not enough to collaborate in a digital world. The challenge in front of us is really to take those technologies and to use them to build physically. And for the first time in history, we have the remote sensing capacity on orbit and the technology to process all of the data into a dynamic, living replica of the physical Earth inside of a computer — what we call the “Living Globe.” You can think of this as a sandbox, a place where you can take the digital representation of our Earth and combine it with a physical representation on the ground, and go back and forth so that sensors can show you what’s actually happening in real-time.Let’s make that real. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles wildfires devastated Southern California. Many of us were personally impacted or know someone who was. Satellite imagery and mapping played a critical role in understanding the impact of that devastation, guiding first responders and shining a spotlight on the destruction that happened. But it’s not enough just to look, to observe, to react. What’s been nagging me since then is that what LA needed, it wasn’t satellite imagery, it was water. Large-scale infrastructure projects, megaprojects, rapid response systems with firefighting robots that would be able to take out the fire before it started.This used to be how we thought. 200 years ago, we were a civilization of builders with a culture of action. We built the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the Hoover Dam — megaprojects that fundamentally reshaped our Earth, our physical world. But these projects had devastating ramifications. Unable to predict their impact and know what the results would be, we retreated into the virtual world, a world of iPhones and personal computers dominated by individualism. The problem is: the problems of the 21st century, they’re fundamentally physical. They’re problems of moving atoms. When you think about climate change, energy abundance, housing affordability, global security, these are problems that require regaining a builder’s spirit and starting to act upon the physical world once again.What we’ve done is we’ve taken dozens and dozens of different data sets. We’ve fused them together into a dynamic and living representation of the Earth. By pulling these into an ontology so that computers and people can interact with them together, we can programmatically start identifying patterns so that we can delegate the monitoring of those patterns to a computer.
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Learn English through Songs
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English Speaking
No.24: Which floor to go to? Learn authentic English from an elevator sign!
No.23: “How to set a budget”? Casino slogans teach you a practical English phrase!
No.22: No parking, learn English from a notice board
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Issue 2730: Extreme Day Trips
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Issue 2728: Forget Hustle Culture. Behold the Artist Corporation (2)