Building the Future - Daniel Hillis

[Music] [Music] i'm very interested in this idea of rethinking building cities from the notion of you know what can be done without tearing them down and building very top-down infrastructure i like the idea of emergent infrastructure but i could easily imagine cities of the future have little launch things that you throw materials or people through the air and that would be a very different kind of thing because it could be built up incrementally or i could imagine for instance sewage and water systems being like root systems that grew under the city and up through the city i think there's some ways of rethinking things that may actually be necessary if we think of building from sort of spontaneously emerged cities one of the nice things about emergent infrastructure is it can be built up in pieces and incrementally and it can evolve and be different in different parts and be very heterogeneous and so i think we'll see that kind of infrastructure evolving one of the big distinctions of life in the future from life in the past is that life in the past was much more bound to a single place so it used to be that where you were born determined what your religion was what kind of food you ate what your politics was what language you spoke you know almost everything about you was determined by where you were and so now that's not so much true anymore it's partly because transportation has become much better for people for goods but also for information in particular i think one of the great things about technology is going to be that it's going to make knowledge and education much more widespread it makes information accessible to many more people so i think that the distinction between the experts and the amateurs will become less because of technology and that opens up many more people to be enables many more people to be creative constructively so i think we're at a very interesting moment in time right now where the idea of even distinguishing between nature and technology is almost an old-fashioned it's becoming an old-fashioned idea it can evolve technological objects the technological objects can have intelligence and growth built into them and so i would say that those distinctions are becoming less and less clear and so i think more and more there will be things that is very hard to say as this is this technology is this nature and in some sense our relationship to technology is becoming more like our relationship with nature because it used to be the technology was understandable that by the way is that's that's what i call the entanglement because we entangle our technology with nature and it becomes much more complicated and and and we'll start to entangle ourselves with our technology even the distinction between where do humans stop and where does technology start so i think manufacturing is becoming very different we'll set up a situation in which the things that we want will create themselves or become formed and created but you know they weren't they won't necessarily be you know assembled out of parts as we do today i think they'll be more grown and informed bucky fuller was certainly a pioneer in kind of thinking about the philosophy of how things are made how we use materials and sort of looking at the fundamentals of that as it's very interesting that you know some of the shapes that he envisioned like geodesic domes we've found actually nature knew about all along it was a fantastic way of thinking about the world and starting to think about you know the use of materials and architecture and things like that so i think that we need both a kind of philosophical long-term framework and then we need practical engineering i am an optimist but i'm not i think i'm not an optimist because i think we have small problems certainly things like global global warming for example is a huge problem so i don't minimize things like that but i think we underestimate our ability to face problems we underestimate the power of creativity but we underestimated the creativity of people to come up with solutions and so so i think i'm an optimist because i am a believer in creativity in the human capacity to solve problems and face challenges

Channel: Norman Foster Foundation

Views: 514

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Id: U2wTD6OXY70

Length: 5min 52sec (352 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020