DAVID A. BANKS

DAVID A. BANKS

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Director of Globalization Studies University of Albany at SUNY
Author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (forthcoming)

I think that is often what tourism is starting to move towards. Is this existential authentic? And what that means is that you're not even really looking to meet expectations or validate that the thing in front of you is what it says it is. You are trying to recreate who you think you should be in a time that is disconnected from your usual life. Because we're a pretty jaded and suspicious society now. “Is it a deep fake?” We live in this world of make-believe and fakeness, and you want to get to something that's real. And what's more real than yourself and the story that you tell to yourself about yourself. And if you can really connect to that, you'll feel really good.

SIR GEOFF MULGAN

SIR GEOFF MULGAN

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Author of Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Social & Political Imagination
Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy & Social Innovation at University College London

The great thing about a complex society is there is space for lots of different kinds of people. There's space for wildly visionary poets and accountants and actuaries and engineers. And they all have a slightly different outlook, but it's the combination of this huge diversity, which makes our societies work. But what we probably do need a bit more of are the bilingual people, the trilingual people who are as at ease spending a day, a week, a year designing how a criminal justice system could look in 50 years and then getting back to perhaps working in a real court or real lawyer's office.


NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS


NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS

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Author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
Director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale · Co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science

We're not attempting to invent super smart AI to replace human cognition. We are inventing dumb AI to supplement human interaction. Are there simple forms of artificial intelligence, simple programming of bots, such that when they are added to groups of humans – because those humans are smart or otherwise positively inclined - that help the humans to help themselves? Can we get groups of people to work better together, for instance, to confront climate change, or to reduce racism online, or to foster innovation within firms? Can we have simple forms of AI that are added into our midst that make us work better together? And the work we're doing in that part of my lab shows that abundantly that's the case. And we published a stream of papers showing that we can do that.

DERRICK EMSLEY

DERRICK EMSLEY

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Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co.

I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air. So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening.