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If you are interested in supporting the bookstores, pick up a copy of the book using the button purchase. Anthony townsend is an expert on Information Technology and a Senior Scientist at the center for transportation policies and management where he supervises research on the impact of information and Communication Technology on mobility, and land use and Transportation Plan and teaches a course at nyu. He is a member of the fellows that has been duly founded. The inaugural club at the institute of new york city Fellowship Research focuses on the emergence of the current influx of funding, talent, data and ideas as well as the impact of research on the local government and citizens. Writing can be found in Scientific American and the stamford review among other publication. Hes the author of 2013 smartest of the big data and the quest for the new utopia. The latest book ghost road is the subject of tonights talk. Please join me in welcoming anthony townsend. Good evening everybody. Thank you for joining me tonight. Its been a tumultuous time in the country and i appreciate your attention given all the other distractions. Feel free to monitor twitter, cnn and whatever else you have running in the other window because theres a lot that needs to be paid attention to and i understand the distraction. One of the things that has been charring launching this book in the pandemic has been the need to reexamine the conclusions in evidence because the book was written over the course of the last three years. I think ive done a pretty good job as a forecaster and a lot of the things that have been fast forwarded at us from the future in the last couple of months, namely around the increase in delivery to homes is something that i think came on very quickly. But in the last week weve basically seen the future kind of fannish. I think we are in a weird period for forecasting where its coming at us fast. Its going to be a feared conversation to talk about Technology Sort of as an abstract thing, but i think what we can do is keep drawing it back to the big picture and whats going on right now because there are some connection. I will do my best to do that as we go through a. Let me just hope over to the keynote presentation. There is going to be a lot of video so long as you see the main images i think what the gist of what im talking about. Its really just to create some flavor for the presentation as opposed to being the main focal point so if you dont see every frame of the video, dont fret. I will explain whats going on. The place to start is to understand what is it that Silicon Valley and to a lesser extent detroit and the other auto Manufacturing Centers around the world have been telling us is coming our way to in the form of driverless mobility. For the most part it is been Driverless Cars and its been going on ten years now since google unveiled their project to googles self driving car. It will be ten years ago this october when they unveiled it. Whats fascinating is this is an old idea. You are looking at a film from 1956. It was gms vision of the future and what you are seeing is a fictional representation of a system that basically would have a camera following a painted line along the road. There are other versions that followed, the guard flyer laid down in the concrete. There were cost estimates at the time of what it would cost to fix the interstate highway system with this kind of capability. Same kind of thing people are talking about with Driverless Technology today and the market demand wasnt fair. There. If people wanted to drive a. Of us stilwas still a new thingn and the people feel like they were in control of. Whats funny is the vision cc of Automated Mobility, this is a tesla product video. In many ways they are not that different. The products are are actually taken from the video i just showed you. They basically par barcode a brd name gm developed 50 years previously. So much of this is part of the fulfillment of a dream the Auto Industry has had for close to 60 or 70 years now but they didnt really have the technology to deliver. And in fact its lik looking muh older trade him back. If you look almost every mystical tradition on the planet you go back and there is some hero or king or god that is moving around in the sky, sometimes on the ground that morgan the generous in wales is a character that could teleport a, a lot of thunderbirds and my favorite is the view that the dungeons of the dragons she makes an appearance and runs around the steps of eurasia in a magical hut to this. Around by two chicken legs. So this idea of selfpropelled vehicles is a very old technological longing and we are just now making it possible to this we are finally fulfilling the dream at the same time that they are achieving the full organization of the planet. Its a statistic sort of trend. By the end of the 21st century will be about 100 urban. Its just a phenomenal phase and creating tremendous challenges for nobody and making solutions have served for a while like single passenger automobiles obsolete. The driverless or so of driving vehicles one of the things i deal with early on in the book are these words we use and what they mean and what they are trying to achieve. Basically [inaudible] or a visually impaired person or i think for a lot of stressed out parents trying to get kids to all these different activities its like here is a car two shuttles were kids around since you dont have to do it. They were testing the waters here to see if this is the next great product they could deliver to the masses. It ought to be compelling by now because the Technical Work to create these things has been going on close to 50 years. This is the mercedes self driving band from the 80s. It had a bunch of computers in the back that would fit in one corner on the side of your iphone now. This was the first self driving vehicle to really drive itself on the road across the country almost under computer control using Computer Vision to interpret imagery of the road and traffic and safely navigate around it. Weve really picked up the pace since then is the last two to three years we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars spent on automated driving. Its changing what we think of as a huge driven industry like aerospace. If anybody didnt catch the space x. Launched yesterday, its pretty exciting. A bit of a distraction from the bad news. The this has been both commercially exciting, technologically and kind of slow to come to fruition but we see is as the promise and the hype has grown, the letdowns and failures have also sort of chronically spectacular. Weve seen that he goes to like this one blew through the red light in downtown san francisco. Accidents involving children in vehicles and this is something that is endemic to the testing of the technology. If it is going to fail on Automated Systems failed and we rely so heavily on automobiles there will be many failures so the reckoning that is associated has given people pause to about this if theyve been as great as we were promised. I dont write that much about the safety issues because im pretty much with the old school of thought if it seems it wont be in the industry but its a problem the industry has to solve a. I am more interested in the other problems around the fact it isnt really cars we need to fix. We need to fix urban mobility more broadly and affect the way we travel has changed so much. We go different places and travel at different times of the day. We travel in groups and have desires in terms of how much we pay a and the impact of our travel among multiple dimensions. Our own personal health and environmental health, traffic and so on so mobility has become more complicated than simply purchasing a consumer product. Its more about the whole range of mobility services. What does this all add up to lex there is a supply and demand at work. Its clear that the Business Case for automation is growing. Its going to be a slow burn for the next few years. Yoit will have to be adjusted depending on how the next Great Depression works out for this is kind of a technical. Its kind of like the virus actually. People come into contact with others who have or have used this technology and try to to to demonstrate the benefits. And others see that and decided they want to acquire it for themselves. Theres also network effects. Fothe more of these that are out there it becomes more and more useful and accelerates. I think we will definitely be seeing peace out on the streets on a regular basis some places faster than others. Its important that its not just the automobiles that the encounter. If youre waiting for David Hasselhoff to go up an you are going to be pretty disappointed. The industry simplistic narrative about automated driving means we are going to protect the car and the future of Automated Mobility is basically what we saw in the minority report. Its moving in synchronization in perfect safety. Its going to be different. We need this to help us understand what the future can be likened to that i like and tt out to do with the book. Her style is to sort of juxtaposing a Natural Beauty and infrastructure. Its almost like the dawn of life scene at the time on earth juxtaposed with this grid of data representing a. It is a simple way of understanding this metaphor. Im not even 100 sure what it is. Its kind of a challenge to. In the future where we go out into the spaces where we move about that we are the minority and machines are in control and often alienating and individually working for us but collectively not and trying to raise thtry toraise the possibit things may get out of control and we have to be vigilant against that. It is a mysterious place. Im going to run through this quick. This is to me what i think elon musk and some of the folks at gm when they fantasize about the future of the automated driving this is what they envision it is a city that has been rationalized around highspeed transportation and has lots of expense to manufacture products. I dont think that this is terribly plausible given the direction things are going. Going through the past. Run by the consortium of the utilities this is the future of automated driving but its like a future that never was. Theres no traffic or even any commercial vehicles on the road of private passenger vehicles. There is no cities where buildings of any kind. Where are these people going if they are not even in the city. So, this is just a totally unrealistic way of thinking about our own future yet this image shows up and this man and Time Magazine your parents may have seen this and its what they may still think a driverless car is. It shows up in every entrepreneurs presentation and sometimes they will be making a joke about it but ofte often its guess we always thought this was the future isnt it great that its finally here and i just find that sort of ridiculous. The kind of Automated Vehicles that were in existence are multiplying a its happened in the evolution of life where we are finding the forms to emerge that can capitalize. They are naming it in driverless shuffles and its a good story worth reading and has a lot to do with the different style of innovation in europe. They started to explore the question of what does it mean if we put this into basically small buildings and starting to move them around. The boundaries between vehicles and buildings may blur the. This is a concept in china. We may end up in a future where a lot of the shops close and main streets by but the retail just moved to the corner and maybe theres some other configuration not justified in going straight to the home. This is actually a bit of a joke, an april fools prank that they pulled, sort of a visualization of. I think that its funny that they sort of got the case that this was driving my column self driving bike wrong. That people would let it drive itself. I dont think thats what you would use it for. What you use a self driving bike for us to drive itself to the next customer if it were a shared bike or to the trojan point or in this world to drive itself [inaudible] for the next user [inaudible] the automated capability. As Research Explores all the ways automation will be useful in mobility, we are going to start to understand all the different ways that its going to create value and new kinds of products and experiences. Singapore you have a couple of startups that are playing around with scooters that basically come to you when you call. There is a long way to go before this doesnt look like a kind of clunky gadgets but it shows entrepreneurs are starting to explore and its going to move very quickly because these things can be prototyped in so quickly. And this is the category of driving vehicles i called urban ushers because they think that they are going to take the place of all the street furniture, the signage, potentially some of the people and personnel who watched over and provide services and attract and respond to things that have been on city streets and potentially do so in ways that are more effective and comprehensive and maybe less brutal. I dont know if we can program a security robots cannot discriminate against people or not use excessive force. But you know, its certainly an appealing possibility right now although it may create many more problems. This is kind of a ridiculous scenario that we see right here. That it does start to help you understand, and again even between Motor Vehicles and buildings on the one side, its also between more vehicles and robotics on the other side. Its all going to sort of blurred together and what we talk about as a robot and car and building may start to be difficult to distinguish from each other as they will be able to move and act on their own. And then getting to the robotics piece, the ability to the gate robots that use animal and human style emotions and what is going to start to challenge our assumptions about what a vehicle is and what a self driving vehicle is and how that fits into the cities and what they might do with it and some of these things just have tremendous capabilities. This one doesnt even have any type of optical or electromagnetic sensors. To navigate solely through what it take picks up through this l. So really just a tremendous amount of innovation. There isnt a day that goes by that i dont learn about a new vehicle. The other two big stories are just five minutes each and then we will open up. Materialization, this is a big part of the book. Its the middle two chapters most will look into whats happening right now and when i was reading the book i spent some time in singapore building the Central Business district in newtown and the basic assumption is 2035, 65 of all retail purchases would be delivered by Automated Vehicles. If you take the automated part out, we sort of fast forward pretty close to that now in a matter of a couple of months. Every way that you look in the Online Retailing and shipping business, thats what you are saying. Five to ten years ahead of where we expected to be. Amazon has been at the forefront of this both good and bad. But if we call this materialization. Its a massive wave of gods sweeping into city streets and really the ability for automation to drive the cost of shutting down in another ten or two in the years to come and unleashing just got much more movement of goods around the city streets and the reason thats important is its not something that has gotten a lot of attention in the talk of a Driverless Technology. Driverless technology. We focused almost exclusively on the Passenger Transportation and none of this even recently has shown that its moving around, and i think much more attention needs to be paid to that and the cities dont really think about it very much. So, one of the things that has happened since the stayathome workers is how flatfooted the city have been trying to understand the bottlenecks from moving more deliv