Welcome to Day 1423 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomSmart Cities – Ask GrampsWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1423 of our Trek, and our focus on Fridays is the future technological and societal advances, so we call it Futuristic Fridays. My personality is one that has always been very future-oriented. Since my childhood, I have yearned for the exploration and discovery of new technologies and advancements for the future. I grew up with the original Star Trek series, and even today, while I am on my 64th revolution around the sun, I still dream of traveling in space. Each week we will explore rapidly converging technologies and advancements, which will radically change our lives. At times, the topics may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, but each area that we explore is already well on its way of becoming a reality over the next couple of decades.  To keep with our theme of “Ask Gramps,” I will put our weekly topics in the form of a question to get us on track. So this week’s question is: Hey Gramps, what will the cities of the future be like? 


Smart CitiesLast week on Futuristic Friday, we explored High-Speed Global Connectivity, which is the delivery method for so many of the technological advances we will investigate. With the global pandemic still impacting the world, and when unrest seems to be nearly everywhere, you must understand that none of these issues will be long-lasting in the grand scheme of the world. Our world is in a disruptive mode, which will speed up the exponential technology that is changing our world today. I am using some of the information mentioned in Peter Diamandis’s blogs and book “The Future is Faster Than You Think.”, as a starting point.


We will do a deeper dive into some technologies, such as transportation separately. This week we will focus on the cities themselves. Each week alone, an estimated 1.3 million people move into cities, driving urbanization on an unstoppable scale. Advancement may slow somewhat due to the pandemic, but not long term.


By 2040, about two-thirds of the world’s population will be concentrated in urban centers. Over the decades ahead, 90 percent of this urban population growth is predicted to flourish across Asia and Africa. As discussed last week, many of these areas are just starting to adopt high-speed global connectivity. Already, 1,000 smart city pilots are under construction or in their final urban planning stages across the globe, driving forward countless visions of the future.


As data becomes the gold or currency of the 21st century, centralized databases and hyper-connected infrastructures will enable everything from sentient cities that respond to data inputs in real-time, to smart public services that revolutionize modern governance. I currently work for a company that is providing integral pieces of the software that will drive this revolution.


Connecting countless industries such as real estate, energy, sensors and networks, transportation, among others — tomorrow’s cities pose no end of creative possibilities and stand to transform the human experience completely.


Today’s podcast is a little longer since we’ll be taking a high-level tour of today’s cutting-edge urban enterprises involved in these three areas:


Hyperconnected urban ecosystems that respond to your data


Smart infrastructure and construction


Self-charging green cities


Let’s dive in!


Smart