Remember reading about the days when they thought the world was flat? (No, that Columbus thing is a myth.)  Last week I spent a few days at the Augmented World Expo where the geekiest folks in this reality unapologetically rallied for the next reality, where the Internet is no longer flat, but a real live immersive 3D experience. Not an easy lift.

Each year the stalwarts gather, pushing ahead on the building blocks of VR, AR, and combined XR realities so that we can all move more of our daily lives: shopping, education, governments and cities, manufacturing and building, healthcare, entertainment and more into new digital experiences.

The show is ten years old and as delightfully geeky as ever. But this year two things stood out. One is that there has been real progress in creating 3D interfaces that don’t need headsets to be experienced. The second is that a new generation of headsets, hoping their time has finally arrived, are coming to market. To headset or not to headset? That is the question.

No Need for Headsets?

Browser based (i.e. no headsets) immersive experiences are getting better. These experiences are designed to give folks with nothing but a desktop, tablet, or phone a chance to meet in the same worlds as their glasses-wearing friends. Current browsers like Chrome were built for a 2D Internet but standards like WebGPU and WebXR are adding the graphics layer needed to experience the metaverse unencumbered by headgear. Companies like Niantic, especially with the acquisition of browser based AR creation platform 8th Wall, believe the phone is the ultimate AR/XR device.

Leslie Shannon, Head of Internet Trends and Scouting at Nokia  gave a talk where she said “The majority of metaverse experiences are happening on mobile phones. Presence is more important than immersion.” And Sightful introduced what it’s calling the world’s first AR laptop.  Put on your glasses, open your ten-inch laptop, and you can work on a full sized multiscreen AR environment.

Headset Mania

In the other corner of the immersive world are the headset evangelists. While Apple wasn’t anywhere to be found at the show the specter of its  impending announcement about XR glasses – unveiled yesterday – hung over the crowd like sword of Damocles. Apple has been super-secretive about what’s behind the curtain other than the fact that it will sit on your face, cost $3,000 and have some amazing optics. Apple’s announcement will certainly give a jolt of life into the headset industry. Whether the acceptance of this rather pricey device as a headset for gamers, enterprise, or both remains to be seen. And so does the killer app that it needs to succeed. Some believe this will be the company’s new “iPhone moment”.  Others say that Apple has failed at product launches before and this will be a repeat performance.

If $3,000 is too much to pay for to wear googles on your head, Meta announced its $500 Quest 3 this week. It’s thinner and more powerful than earlier versions. The Android-centric amongst us are watching for the Google/Samsung XR headset. Magic Leap showcased the Magic Leap 2 which allows for collaborative work in mixed reality and allows you to view the physical world with a VR overlay in a lightweight form factor.  (The lines at the booth to don a pair of glasses and see for yourself were long!)

According to Ori Inbar, the co-founder of AWE and longtime champion of immersive worlds, the  $38 billion XR industry is growing steadily at 30% annually. Fortune 1000 companies are donning optical headsets for everything from training to product collaboration. Already 1.2 billion users have experienced AR and XR, transforming verticals such as healthcare, entertainment, education, and gaming.”  “ Putting things over our heads is weird” says Inbar. “Even umbrellas took 200 years until they became culturally accepted by British men. I think that XR will be much faster.”

Neil Trevett, President of the Metaverse Standards Organization (MSO), has been working with 1,500 stakeholder companies to “tame the beast” and apply rigorous open standards to the creation of immersive worlds. The group upvoted which topics to tackle.  “Topping the list,” he says, “are interoperability, avatar creation, mapping formats, 3D object formats, and a big emphasis on privacy and security.”  Trevett believes that closed/proprietary systems like Apple’s offer healthy competition to the open systems that MSO is fostering.”

In the midst of AI mania, the headset/virtual worlds debate took a backseat in media coverage. In the coming weeks the headsets will be returning in full force to fight for their rightful place atop your nose.

Update:  On June 5^th Apple announced its much awaited Vision Pro, a $3,500 headset. Built into the ski-goggle looking device there are 12 cameras, 5 sensors, and 6 mics, explaining the price. The big idea is that you can experience a wide variety of XR experiences, including creating a larger than life desktop of apps, playing ultra high resolution games and experiencing a pass through experience where  you see the physical world while interacting with the virtual one. You can control the system with your eyes, voice, and hand flicks, and the UI lives in your space. Tim Cook called it Apple’s first product that you can look through, not at.

One of the catchiest jingles on US television, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” may need a rewrite after the insurance giant announced that, as of Saturday, it would no longer offer home insurance to new customers in California. Existing insurance policies are not affected.

According to a statement the company released on its website, the decision was at least partially motivated by the effects of climate change and “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.”

The seven largest wildfires in California’s history have all occurred in the past five years and, with global temperatures continuing to go up, there is a good chance that these fires will continue to wreak havoc on the state.

At least that’s what State Farm, the largest home and auto insurer in the US, seems to think.

“We take seriously our responsibility to manage risk,” the company said, adding that it recognizes “the Governor’s administration, legislators, and the California Department of Insurance (CDI) for their wildfire loss mitigation efforts.”

State Farm also cited “historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation” as well as a “challenging reinsurance market” as reasons for taking this step.

Insurance companies have historically been on the frontlines of anticipating current and future risk. That is, after all, their business.

However, climate change and the weather catastrophes that come with it have made that job much more difficult.

Eric Anderson, the president of Aon PLC, a global insurance and reinsurance provider, told the Senate Budget Committee earlier this year that the uncertainty associated with climate change has created “a crisis of confidence around the ability to predict loss.”

This, Anderson said, has led reinsurance companies, which protect insurance companies from catastrophic losses, to withdraw from certain markets.

“Just as the U.S. economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is overexposed to climate risk,” the executive testified in March.

According to the World Property and Casualty Insurance Report 2022, “economic losses driven by climate change have increased by 250% in the last three decades.”

The report also found that 40 percent of insurers are “ranking climate change as a top priority, with insurability and profitability as leading climate-related issues.”

So, what does this mean for homeowners and businesses in California and other places at high risk of climate change-fueled natural disasters?

It is very likely that their insurance will either get much more expensive, or that they will be stuck paying for damages.

In a report published earlier this year, the reinsurance company Gallagher Re noted that weather events that were intensified by climate change caused direct economic costs of $360 billion in 2022. However, insurance providers only covered about 40 percent of that amount.

The report stated that last year was “another year where climate change, exposure growth and social inflation were the clear primary driving forces of loss,” adding that “the fingerprints of climate change were visible on virtually every major weather and climate event in 2022.”

June 7&8th, join Worth in Charleston for Worth Cities: Innovation and the Rising City. The conference will offer a diverse range of panel discussions, keynote speeches, and networking opportunities for attendees, as well as opportunities to experience Charleston’s renowned culture and cuisine. We will explore innovations, best practices, emerging trends, and new leadership from cities around the United States. To discover our speakers, full agenda, or register click here. 

During my second ride in one of Waymo’s autonomous-driving cars, there is a moment where I catch my breath and tense up. Waymo’s driverless car turns left at an intersection on a two-way, four-lane street in downtown Phoenix. The steering wheel starts rotating by itself. As the car accelerates into the intersection, I hear the whir of the Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV that Waymo has modified with autonomous technology. At the same time, I see a pick-up truck coming from the opposite direction bearing down on us, aiming at the passenger door next to me. That is when a pedestrian steps off the curb and starts walking across the street we must turn into to avoid being pancaked by the oncoming truck.

It all takes maybe a second or so, yet in that time, I can’t help but wonder: Are we going to kill this woman? The Waymo, however, handles it perfectly. The car pauses to let the woman cross the street, then accelerates quickly but smoothly through the intersection.

In 2016, Google renamed itself Alphabet and spun off the newly named Waymo—an acronym for “way forward in mobility”—as an independent subsidiary, ultimately funded by some five billion dollars in private investment. That same year, with the fervent support of Republican governor Doug Ducey, Waymo came to Phoenix.

Because of Ducey’s desire to attract Silicon Valley investment, jobs, and technology, Arizona was an early state to legalize ride sharing. Ducey wanted Waymo to make Phoenix its safe haven. “Over the past two years,” the New York Times reported in November, 2017, “Arizona has deliberately cultivated a rules-free environment for driverless cars, unlike dozens of other states that have enacted autonomous vehicle regulations over safety, taxes, and insurance. …The payoff for Arizona has been a tech boom.”

“When I see a Waymo gliding down the street, turning its own wheel, I think, ‘The future is Phoenix,’” Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego says now. To stay economically competitive with other cities and states, “deploying new technology is something we must do, and we pride ourselves on that. The technology of tomorrow is tested in Phoenix today.”

It’s now been about five years since Waymo has let members of the public ride in its cars, and the results are remarkable. Waymo has racked up over 1,000,000 miles of driving on public roads without a single “vulnerable road user contact,” says Waymo’s Amanda Ventura. (“Vulnerable road user contact” is Waymo-speak for hitting a pedestrian, a cyclist, a motorcyclist, a dog, a deer—anything living, basically.) The technology is also being deployed with Waymo One in San Francisco, and on trucks traveling between Phoenix and Tucson, as well as between Houston and Dallas, Texas. (Highways pose fewer challenges for Waymo technology than city-driving, Ventura tells me—there are fewer scenarios for the technology to anticipate.)

Autonomous cars will change the world in ways we can’t anticipate. And that future will unfold in Phoenix, first.

Recycling was once all the rage. Reduce, reuse, recycle! We recited it like a mantra. To toss our cans and bottles into the blue bin was to take on personal environmental responsibility; it meant we care. However, of late, local governments once responsible for maintaining curbside recycling services have slowly pulled back, saying that the math simply doesn’t add up.

A study from the University of Florida suggests, however, that the practice is still worth our while, and, in fact, can help small municipalities reach their climate goals.

Communities have increasingly reduced their acceptance of glass and aluminum, and some have eliminated curbside pickup altogether amid spiraling costs. Conscientious individuals still committed to the vision find themselves toting their bottles and boxes to recycling centers on their own time. Others shrug, saying climate change and waste is a big, systemic problem, and that individual actions are negligible.

The researchers attempted to pinpoint the real impact of household recycling on the climate. To do this, they looked at the monthly household cost of waste management, and compared it with the greenhouse gas emissions that waste disposal generates, with and without recycling. In their analysis, the level of emissions avoided from recycled waste offset carbon emissions from solid waste landfills.  It also avoids further emissions by reducing the amount of trash going into landfills.

“Our analysis highlights that kerb-side recycling provides communities a return on investment similar to or better than climate change mitigation strategies such as voluntary green power purchases and transitioning to electric vehicles,” the researchers wrote in their study, published Monday in Nature. “Eliminating recycling squanders one of the easiest opportunities for communities and citizens to mitigate climate change and reduce natural resources demands.”

According to study co-author Timothy Townsend, the actual costs of recycling haven’t actually increased by a huge amount since municipal recycling programs took off in the 1980s.  “It’s pretty common to see negative articles about how recycling isn’t working,” Townsend said. “What if we were to recycle smarter?”

Townsend believes that if higher value materials are prioritized – including newspaper, aluminum and steel cans, cardboard, and certain kinds of plastic – recycling plants may more easily recoup costs.  When done right, well-prioritized recycling management, even if it still costs a little more money up front than not recycling at all, is offset by the resulting reductions in landfill greenhouse gas emissions, and the conservation of resources.

There are still caveats to recycling, many of which factor into increased public apathy and municipal disinvestment. Collection and sorting is more expensive than dumping it all in a landfill. However, Townsend’s team argue that recycling has always been a little bit expensive, but it’s only in the past decade or so that commodity markets have plunged, making many recycled materials less profitable than they once were. The recycling market was most profitable around 2011, when the cost per household ran as low as $3 per year; after COVID-19 and the resulting market fluctuations, the cost ran as high as $42. Recycling has also become single-stream, meaning residents often throw everything in one bin, which must later be sorted by workers. This is labor-intensive, and often, when a bin is contaminated with food or liquids, it all goes to the landfill anyway.

Rebecca A. Fannin will be speaking at the Worth Cities Summit 2023 taking place on June 8th in Charleston, SC. Come to see Fannin speak live, in person by registering here.

What has been known as the Rust Belt—a symbolic name for the rusting out of idled steel mills and auto factories—is now shedding its rust and developing the shine of a Tech Belt. This former pinnacle of the U.S. economy is making a comeback, which bodes well not just for our country’s heartland but for our economy and morale nationwide.

It’s in sync with President Joe Biden’s vow to “Build Back Better”: to create millions of jobs, invest more in research and development and emerging technologies, and upgrade worker skills across a broad swath of America. This renewal promises to rebalance the money and power that shifted to Silicon Valley—and to China.

The Silicon Valley elite may have ridiculed the Midwest as “flyover country,” but the heartland has begun the road to recovery. The erosion of manufacturing work over the past decades can’t be replaced by minimum-wage jobs. Many inner cities and rural towns in Middle America continue to struggle with population decline, poverty, opioid addiction, weak or no broadband, poor social services, crumbling infrastructure, and a diminishing tax base. Trashed eyesores remain.

Despite these very real obstacles, the revitalization of bygone industrial regions built on coal, iron ore, and oil by legends named Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Frick is underway. Now, with more investment in startups, technologies, workforce retraining, infrastructure rebuilding, and R&D, the economic woes underlying mid-American gloom are being reversed and helping us maintain our global innovative edge.

The “flyover country” stereotype has existed for years. The Midwest has been seen as the home of manufacturing and mining dinosaurs. Of boring plodders. But these perceptions are outdated. Driving my Honda Element SUV, I started a grassroots reporting journey in the summer of 2020. It was a hands-on way of learning about the current state of the country. It was also a significant personal trip. Since graduating from Ohio University, I hadn’t been back much. There had been little reason to go home, other than for holidays and funerals.

Home is the town of Lancaster in Fairfield County, just north of the Appalachian foothills. It was a good place to start and a great centralized base for traveling throughout the heartland, from the hollows of West Virginia to the rivers Allegheny, Monongahela, and Scioto; to the factory towns of Pittsburgh and Youngstown; to the motor cities of Detroit and Flint; to Hoosier country and the bluegrass of Kentucky. Google Maps on my smartphone was an able navigator.

It was a trip down memory lane: I revisited the places of my childhood and the original homestead of my father’s family on Kentucky’s Zion Ridge, where there is still no running water and few paved roads, but a tobacco barn, a pond, cows, and mountain scenery. It was moving.

But I also brought my reporter’s eye. As I explored these rustic spots decimated by industrial decline, I knew that innovation springs from necessity, from the worst of circumstances. And my onsite reporting of emerging economies throughout Asia helped me to recognize a developing region, this time in the American heartland. I put eight thousand miles on my Honda Element, driving on winding country roads past cornfields and pastures, and on flat interstate highways with billboards and mileage posts signaling my next destination. It’s good that gasoline was cheap then.

Right here in Middle America, I discovered a reenergized economy built on optimism, innovation, sheer grit, and a strong work ethic. Throughout remote zip codes of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, I found aging, one-industry towns beginning to diversify. In previously forlorn places I discovered technologically advanced upstarts in biotech, 3D printing, self-driving cars, green energy, artificial intelligence, and robotics. I found all-American, higher-skilled (and higher-paying) jobs in a number of metro areas. I saw Zoom towns of remote worker bees that had popped up in Appalachia. It was a trend that wouldn’t have seemed obvious except that I took the time to explore, not just drive by on the freeway.

On my road trips, I interviewed countless innovators who are digging out from the shutdown of auto- and steelmakers, mines, and chemical plants. There was space robotics technology in Pittsburgh searching for water on the moon; brain stimulation research in West Virginia seeking to cure Alzheimer’s disease; and from Athens, Ohio, ultracold storage techniques for distributing vaccines to fight COVID.

Without fanfare, a pivotal movement has been growing to restore the American dream in towns like Lancaster and cities like one-time industrial center Dayton, home to the Wright brothers and their flying machine. Tech ecosystems—entrepreneurial talent, accelerators, incubators, universities, and scientific breakthroughs—are retooling midsized heartland cities and Appalachian towns. Remote regions that were nearly forgotten when the money and power shifted to Silicon Valley—and to China—are being rebooted. Who doesn’t want to be part of a reemerging American frontier that’s bringing back jobs, raising incomes, and helping us beat back China?

It’s true that the Midwest doesn’t yet boast a high-profile tech company like Apple or Tesla or Zoom (though Intel is investing $20 billion in a new semiconductor plant in central Ohio). Nor does it have a venture capital player in the league of Sequoia Capital or Accel or Andreessen Horowitz. But Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Detroit, and other cities that defined yesterday’s industrial revolution are evolving as high-tech centers. Over the past decade, venture capital investment has quadrupled and 18,000 startups have formed in the region. Tech talent is moving in from the coasts, and Columbus and Indianapolis are seeing a population boom.

Prominent Silicon Valley leaders such as Salesforce and Oracle are swooping in to acquire cutting-edge companies in the Midwest. Tech icons like Cisco’s John Chambers and Brad Smith, previously with Intuit, are creating entrepreneurial sparks in Appalachia with philanthropic and funding efforts to revitalize the poverty-stricken state. The venture firm Drive Capital, launched in Columbus by two former Sequoia Capital partners from the Bay Area, is bringing Silicon Valley-style investing to Middle America and has already backed more than sixty startups region-wide, with several wins, including language-learning app Duolingo.

As Drive Capital’s cofounder Mark Kvamme told me over lunch in the hip Short North district of Columbus, “You don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to build a great technology company.”

With so much at stake in revitalizing the Rust Belt and bringing back jobs, it’s no wonder that big names in business and politics like Steve Case and Michael Bloomberg are putting time, energy, and money into a turnaround and an untapped entrepreneurial well.

Several midwestern tech hubs are at the starting gate to be the next Silicon Valley, following the evolution of Silicon Beach in Los Angeles, Silicon Hills in Austin, and Silicon Alley in New York City, but each developing its own distinct identity. It’s not about creating the next Pokémon Go or NFT. It’s about practical technology applications in healthcare, finance, education, and transportation. Unlike fads that flamed out, mid-American tech is grounded in robotics, artificial intelligence, software services, green energy, 3D printing, and biotech.

As the real estate saying goes, it’s all about location, but it’s also about proximity to resources. Sand Hill Road, the nation’s venture capital nucleus, sprang up right next to Stanford University. TusPark, Beijing’s tech and venture hub, developed just outside the gates of Tsinghua University. Likewise, hubs in the Midwest leverage nearby talent, R&D, and intellectual capital. There’s a tech buzz around such strongholds as the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the healthtech corridor around the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic, the 3D printing campus of the Youngstown Business Incubator, and Nationwide Insurance and Ohio State University in Columbus.

Pittsburgh’s so-called Silicon Strip was once mainly warehouses. Today, it sports a newly built, four-story space for virtual reality labs creating avatars at Facebook (now Meta). Pittsburgh’s remarkable high-tech climb from its Steel Town roots stems from engineering-strong Carnegie Mellon University. As former Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto has said, the city “still shows its scars from the past, but from fossil fuels and robotics, artificial intelligence, and biotech, we are building it better.”

Of course, the Rust Belt’s transformation hasn’t reached everywhere. In some devastated, off-the-grid areas, change is glacial and largely anecdotal. Inexperience, lower expectations, capital shortages, and few advancement opportunities stand in the way. Newly empowered startups may fall short of replacing work lost due to deindustrialization. Marginalized people may not make it into the much-heralded middle class. But this push forward could narrow the stark economic divide between elite coastal states, with their gated communities, swimming pools, and Tesla cars, and the old Rust Belt, with its rusted-out factories; dilapidated trailer homes; and front yards full of junk.

The collapse of steel mills, chemical plants, and coal mines over the past fifty years devastated

the region. And those blue-collar jobs aren’t coming back. Automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and offshoring production to China have seen to that.

But a new, innovative mindset has emerged, along with a new industrial policy to invest in America and compete with China. As John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco Systems, put it, “When the factories and mines closed, our drive, dreams, and curiosity were lost. Now we need to dream again, and to achieve those dreams we need to become a startup country.” His deeply ingrained lesson? “We need to stay ahead of market transitions, to disrupt or be disrupted.”

Silicon Heartland: Transforming the Midwest from Rust Belt to Tech Belt was published March, 2023, by Charlesbridge Publishing / Imagine

Rebecca A. Fannin is a journalist, media founder, and author of four books including Silicon Dragon (2008), Startup Asia (2011), Tech Titans of China (2019), and her latest, Silicon Heartland (2023).

What could a city like New York achieve if it repurposed some of its 3 million curbside parking spots?

It could get rid of rats by moving trash off the sidewalks and into containers. It could create safe, cool play spaces for the more than 1 million New Yorkers without easy park access. It could build bioswales to collect rainwater and prevent flooding during heavy storms.

It could even help drivers kick their addictions to cars and avert climate catastrophe, writes Henry Grabar, author of the new book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.

Instead, the city devotes most of its curb space — an area equivalent to 52 Central Parks, according to advocacy group Transportation Alternatives — to parking.

“We have all this land that’s being currently allocated in one of the least efficient and least environmentally sound ways possible,” Grabar said. “If you begin to think about retrofitting and adapting that, the possibilities are endless.”

Paved Paradise reveals how cheap and convenient car storage exacerbates the housing shortage (the U.S. allocates more land to car storage than to housing), siphons public assets into private hands, blights downtowns and fuels the climate crisis.

Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, grew up in Lower Manhattan in the 1990s. In the book, he recounts travails familiar to anyone who has ever looked for parking in New York: His father used to drop the family off in front of their building before he set off in search of a curbside spot; as a teenager, Grabar was often tasked with sitting behind the wheel of his parked family’s station wagon, “…hoping I would not have to move the car when the ticket cop came. I was too young to drive.”

He has written about housing, transportation, and urban politics for the last decade. “In story after story, I kept finding this hidden factor that seemed to be determinative of the way various projects turned out,” he said. “That system was parking.”

Grabar traces much of the design and feel of modern U.S. cities to the postwar era, when American car ownership skyrocketed and much of the middle class moved to the suburbs. “The question of where to park all these cars consumed American politicians, shop owners, traffic engineers, and urban planners in the 1950s and 1960s,” he writes. “Cities sought to emulate the suburban parking model and very nearly destroyed themselves in the process.”

Today, Americans drive more than almost anyone else in the world, and transportation is the U.S.’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. (Electric vehicles may reduce emissions, but the need for chargers brings a host of other parking challenges, Grabar notes.) Americans’ propensity toward driving isn’t simply a function of our size — Americans drive 60% more than Australians and Canadians — but rather, he writes, “we built a country with exceptional rewards for driving and punishments for getting around any other way.”

Parking exacerbates the problem. When it’s free, there are often shortages, incentivizing drivers like his father to circle the same block several times in search of a spot. Across the country, zoning laws often require new developments to build a set number of off-street parking spots. Those rules, Grabar argues, create sprawl (which in turn incentivizes more driving) and fuel the current housing shortage.

“I think people’s opposition to new neighbors is often motivated by their fear of traffic and parking problems,” Grabar said. If cities provide comfortable and convenient alternatives to cars, “you can defang one of the most prevalent NIMBY arguments, which is really about traffic and parking. Rarely do you hear people say, ‘There were too many people on the sidewalk’ or, ‘There are too many people at the park.’”

The U.S. has the highest rate of road accidents of any OECD country, and traffic fatalities are on the rise. In 2021, some 43,000 people, including more than 7,000 pedestrians, died on U.S. roads, making it an outlier among economically advanced nations.

The problem is particularly acute in low-income and minority communities, which are less likely to have sidewalks, marked crossings and other designs meant to make spaces safe for pedestrians. Black pedestrians are nearly twice as likely to be struck and killed in traffic as white pedestrians.

Low-income and minority communities are also disproportionately exposed to air pollution — often the result of traffic emissions — and suffer higher rates of asthma and other respiratory ailments.

Grabar points out another, perhaps overlooked way that parking contributes to the climate crisis: Cement is responsible for nearly 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, much of which goes toward the provision of parking. And all that pavement contributes to the loss of wetlands, forests and other greenspaces, a process that can release carbon into the atmosphere and reduce biodiversity.

Paving over our cities also makes them less able to adapt to a changing climate. Asphalt and cement contribute to the urban heat island effect, which means that these surfaces create areas that can be several degrees warmer than green spaces nearby. Because of historic redlining practices, minority and low-income communities are more likely to live in urban heat islands.

These impervious surfaces also make cities more susceptible to flooding, another phenomenon on the rise as the planet warms. In Houston, Grabar writes, 50 years of unfettered growth “have sealed a Belgium-sized section of Texas grassland beneath asphalt, concrete, and land.” When Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 100 billion tons of water on the state in 2017, the water had nowhere to go.

But if Paved Paradise is an indictment of what parking has done to the modern American city, it’s also an invitation to imagine what else is possible. In 2011, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation moved 1,200 employees to a new headquarters in Seattle, it began charging for on-site parking while offering free bike lockers and transit cards. The share of workers who drove to work fell from 90% to 34% in six years. In Paris, officials have removed thousands of curbside parking spaces, including in front of some 200 schools.

“It creates this beautiful intermediary space between the school and the streets where kids can play and their parents and people walking by can gather,” Grabar said.

As New Yorkers have seen in recent years with the construction of more than 12,000 outdoor dining sheds, repurposing the streets transformed the city’s restaurant scene and helped sustain thousands of businesses during a pandemic.

Of course, parking is a political lightning rod that Grabar grapples with throughout the book. Curbside parking is such a ubiquitous feature of urban life that many of us fail to see what it has taken away from our cities’ landscapes.

Returning to the New York proposal to convert curbside parking into trash containers, Grabar asked me to imagine a city with functional sanitation. “[Imagine] if the city said, ‘We found a way to create 150,000 extra parking spaces, but we’re going to throw the trash all over the sidewalk. You’re gonna have to walk through it, and there’s going to be a ton of rats,’” he said, describing the current state of affairs.

“I don’t think anyone would say that’s a better system.”

> For more content on cities, join us for the Worth Cities: Innovation & the Rising City event on Jun 8th, 2023 in Charleston, SC.

November is an auspicious month. It was in November 2022 that ChatGPT was thrust into the public domain. It was also in November (2014) when Alexa became available to the public – and she was everywhere. Remember the Alexa frenzy? You could not utter the name “Alexa” on a phone call, or in a home without snapping some random digital assistant to attention. Any parent who’d named their child Alexa rued the day. There was the unforgettable AARP meets Alexa SNL skit imagining an Alexa for old folks. Voice was all the rage. We were a nation held captive. Sadly, Alexa’s primitive chatbot-like capabilities are no match for today’s chatbots, most famously Bing, Bard, and ChatGPT. like But, like those early Alexa days, AI chatbots are becoming inescapable.

In the early days of ChatGPT, you had to make a conscious effort to actively seek it out and start prompting. Other generative AI programs like Dall-e also made you come to them. Fast forward a few months and you’re suddenly finding yourself hard-pressed to keep AI at bay. In much the same way that Alexa allowed 3rd party developers to build out multitudes of apps from shopping lists to bedtime stories, AI is following suit, building AI-enabled apps atop the major large language models.

I made the mistake of adding the Chrome extension for ChatGPT named Merlin into my browser.  Now Merlin appears (gobbling half my screen real estate) to summarize any website I’m contemplating visiting. On Expedia, you can use the ChatGPT engine as your travel agent. ChatGPT-powered Instacart can provide easy recipes. Over at Klarna, an online shopping company, you can query its ChatGPT-powered backend to “find the greatest new television set” and have a shopping dialog. Open AI, the parent company of ChatGPT, just announced 70 new plug-ins. The plug-ins were developed by third-party developers so that you never have to leave what you’re doing to access ChatGPT’s superpowers. (One caveat: you must be a “Plus” paying member of ChatGPT to access these features).

Grammarly used to do an awesome job of improving my writing by checking my grammar and punctuation. The new generative AI-powered Grammarly Go goes way beyond. It asks if want my writing shortened, made funnier, more assertive, or even whether I want to add images it can find for me.

Over at Adobe, I’m now using generative AI that’s been trained on voices to eliminate background noises (dogs, trains, dishwashers, or music in an exhibit hall) from my videos.  This week Adobe introduced its own generative AI features, dubbed Firefly that will generate images and font effects as its first salvo into the AI arena. Its model was trained on Adobe’s huge catalog of images along with openly licensed content and stuff from the public domain. Again, no heading off to an outside image creation you’re working in AI without leaving Adobe.

Google I/O, the company’s annual conference for developers, should have been called Google AI Paloozza. All of Google’s product lines were reimagined with a long-drink of AI razzle-dazzle. As demonstrated during the event, Gmail will now craft answers to your emails. Maps will provide high-fidelity views of places on your journey before you set out the door. Photos will use a magic editor so that your skies are always blue and your backgrounds are always beautiful. (Up for debate – are these deep fakes or better photos?) Docs, spreadsheets … 25 Google products in all will get an AI IV-drip from Google’s large language model PaLM 2. Again, AI is at your fingertips without ever leaving your workspace.

AI Is Coming for You, Not Vice Versa

The observation here is threefold. First, Amazon thus far has missed its opportunity to make Alexa into a really cool AI product. It’s sold more than 100 million Echo devices, integrated Alexa with 85,000 smart home products, and its app store now boasts over 100,000 skills. Yet the company’s AI focus has been almost exclusively on AWS. Amazon is not developing its own large language model but licensing others. But ‘come on. Wouldn’t it be so cool to have an AI-powered Chatbot you could talk to?

More importantly, if the past few months’ announcements of built-in AI capabilities into our everyday work tools keep up at this pace, AI will soon become a seamless part of everything we already do. You won’t have to travel to find your chatbot. It will be coming to everything, and I mean everything, near you.

And finally, the business model for generative AI has grown up (and quickly).  Licensing fees from developers, usage fees for AI-powered apps, Meta  toying with AI-generated ads, and giving away it’s model to third party developers at no charge. Experiment while you can, before the bill comes due.

A new genomic resource released by scientists this month promises to streamline the use of genomic testing and precision medicine for patients of all ancestries. It is a significant advance that comes two decades after the first human genome sequence was declared complete.

The original human genome sequence was based largely on the DNA of a single person, with bits and pieces of DNA from other individuals added over time as scientists learned more about our genomic blueprints. This genome sequence served as a reference for the entire genomics community; any DNA sequenced from another person was immediately compared to the reference to glean important insights about disease risk and other traits.

But all along, researchers knew that having a single reference genome would limit what they could learn about other people — especially people whose ancestry isn’t represented by that genome. The genome-based tests used to guide precision medicine, for example, often can’t find genetic variants that have not been previously identified in the reference genome. Genetic variants that are common in other populations might be clinically meaningful, but are likely to go undetected without a more representative reference.

Now, scientists have published what they call a “pangenome” reference. It’s a collection of high-quality genome sequences from 47 people of diverse ancestries from Africa, Asia, and North and South America. The work comes from the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium, a large collaboration of scientists funded to the tune of $40 million by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). It’s the first phase of a larger project that aims to sequence 350 people by 2024 to capture a broad range of human genetic diversity.

One of the most important outcomes of this new resource should be to improve genome interpretation — the task of spotting clinically relevant genetic variants to diagnose or prevent disease or to match a patient to the right treatment. “Everyone has a unique genome, so using a single reference genome sequence for every person can lead to inequities in genomic analyses,” said Adam Phillippy, a consortium member and scientist at NHGRI, in a statement announcing the pangenome. Scientists and doctors will have a better chance of finding key genetic variants when they compare someone’s DNA data to this large reference set of genomes than they did when the reference was just one genome.

“This will help make the reference useful for all people, thereby helping to reduce the chances of propagating health disparities,” said Eric Green, NHGRI director, in the same statement.

The pangenome could also provide a much-needed foundation for new initiatives to automate the genome interpretation process or even to incorporate AI into interpretation. Until now, efforts to streamline the discovery of genetic variants and other key steps needed to interpret a genome have been constrained by the limited utility of a single reference genome. With nearly four dozen genomes — and by this time next year, potentially hundreds of genomes — it should be much easier to deploy advanced computational tools and improve what is now a largely manual process.

When we read history books, decades from now, November 30th of 2022 will mark a turning point. That was the day Open AI unleashed ChatGPT on an unsuspecting public. Five days later ChatGPT had 1 million users. And just like that, we entered the biggest and possibly most consequential beta test of humanity.

Reports of hallucinating, obstreperous chatbots and talk of stochastic parrots set off a media frenzy. Five months into the experiment and we have hundreds of competing AI chatbots vying to do everything from rule on legal matters, diagnose our medical conditions, invest our money, hire us for our jobs, and yes, write this column.

Like stages of grief, we are cycling through the stages of public experimentation with AI. Very publicly.

Stage 1: Marvel. “Isn’t this amazing”?

Stage 2: Mastery We can break this because we’re smarter.

Stage 3: Rational terror. “Gee, this is getting scary. They’re learning faster than I am and I have no idea where they’re learning what they know.”

Stage 4: Backlash. We’ve got to put some guardrails around this thing before it does serious damage.

The Backlash Scenarios

Backlashes come in all shapes and forms, from mild concern to dramatic over-reactions. But, it’s useful to look at the broad range of reactions we’re seeing to the birth of publicly available AI. Here’s a look at the primary concerns.

Information Will No Longer Be Free

Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on as much of the Internet as they can gobble up. Vast repositories of human information housed on places like Reddit, Twitter, Quora, Wikipedia as well as books, academic papers and crazy chats are scraped as training grounds for these models. In the past many platforms have made their Application Programming Interface (API), the method through which outside entities can incorporate program’s information, freely available.

Suddenly, freely available means “no cost” trainers for companies like Open AI. Should companies whose businesses rely on its body of knowledge be giving this away freely?  Doubtful “free” will continue as companies demand compensation for data feeding the AI beast,

The NYT recently reported that Reddit wants to begin charging companies for access its API. Twitter is also cracking down on the use of its API, which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations. Microsoft announced a plan to offer large businesses private servers for a fee. That way they could keep sensitive data from being used to train ChatGPT’s language model and could also prevent inadvertent data leaks.

Then there are businesses that will begin to opt out or silo their data and communications, fearful of being part of ChatGPT’s unquenchable thirst. Companies including Samsung banned the use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT on its internal networks and company-owned devices. Financial companies including JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank have either banned or restricted the use of AI tools.

The implications for both scenarios are vast. Large platforms have, in the past made their APIs available to the public for research, 3rd party development, and more. If they begin asking for compensation, all bets are off. The entire ecosystem of 3rd-party development could be upended. So could the entire nature of an open-Internet.

The natural extension of opting out is that every news outlet, blogger, and other contributors to the web starts either asking for compensation based on their contribution or silos its information. Information would be held hostage.

Great Minds Call for a Moratorium

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, a Google researcher often called “The Godfather of AI,” very publicly announced he would leave Google so that he could speak more freely about the risks associated with using AI.

Before Hinton’s departure, came that well publicized “bro” letter where industry insiders including Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, and other typically impetuous thinkers, wrote a public letter to Open AI asking the founders to pause further training on its learning model until it was better understood. That’s probably not going to happen. ChatGPT already opened pandora’s box, let the genie out of the bottle.

Regulation

Italy banned ChatGPT. So did China, Cuba, and a host of other countries. Regulators and legislators worldwide are scurrying. The EU has been leading the way for some time. In 2020, a European Commission white paper “On Artificial Intelligence—A European Approach to Excellence and Trust” and its subsequent 2021 proposal for an AI legal framework looks at risks posed by using AI. Following suit, the White House put forth its own blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. It is not codified into any law, but rather a framework created by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to protect the American public in the age of artificial intelligence. This week the White House took its next move by announcing a series of steps to fund AI research institutes, systematically assess generative AI systems, and meet with the CEOs of large AI platforms in order to inform policy.

Chamath Palihapitya, the founder and CEO of Social Capital, a large venture fund, argues that  “given the emergence of so many different AI players and platforms, we need a public gatekeeper. With an effective regulatory framework, enforced by a new federal oversight body, we would be able to investigate new AI models, stress-test them for worst-case scenarios, and determine whether they are safe for use in the wild.”

Regulators are still debating what to do about everything from existing social media platforms to cryptocurrency. They are unlikely candidates to move swiftly on the AI issue.

You Can’t Regulate What You Can’t Understand

Looking elsewhere, one of the most clear-headed analysis comes from Tim O’Reilly, author and publisher of O’Reilly media. Like Palihapitya, O’Reilly penned an open letter calling for increased AI transparency and oversight, but not necessarily governmental. The first step, says O’Reilly is “robust institutions for auditing and reporting.” As a starter he asks for detailed disclosure by AI creators in some form of public ledger.

There’s also a sweet irony in all these scenarios. Technology cheerleaders who have always been leery of regulation are now begging for some regulatory body to step up to the plate. Cynics might call this enlightened self-interest, but I suspect it’s because they truly understand the magnitude of this technology.

There’s a long-standing precedent of oversight by committees when new technologies hit the market. A recent example is the Metaverse Standards Forum, which I’ve written about before, where important issues from interoperability to privacy are tackled by committee. In the world of biology and genetics, CRISPR technology is also wending its way towards a regulatory framework.

The definition of a backlash is “a strong, adverse reaction to a controversial issue.” Economic models of compensation will be worked out. An outright ban is a folly. A moratorium seems unlikely. Regulators will forever be behind the eight-ball. That leaves us with oversight, transparency, and a public ledger as the best defense. The backlash to AI is not a human hallucination. It’s real, and deservedly so.