The best way to build the future is to create it – Northeastern-Seattle hosts Seattle 2035

November 5, 2015

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The best way to build the future is to create it – Northeastern-Seattle hosts Seattle 2035

By: Dean Tayloe Washburn
Last week the future was alive and well here at our Seattle graduate campus, where we partnered with Xconomy to host Seattle 2035.  This all-day conference featured 27 of this region’s most pioneering thinkers, inventors and innovators sketching out for the 200 attendees their best thoughts on the advances in Seattle in the next 20 years.  The topics ranged from the future of cities to the region’s role as a global leader in big data, the cloud, virtual reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

22653287152_9df2d24a31_kThe day kicked off with two of our most prominent leaders in computer science.

Ed Lazowska from UW Computer Science and Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research, focused on the remarkable role that the Seattle region has played in the computing and now cloud revolutions. Preserving this role should be a top priority – and attracting and training the workforce is the main key – if Seattle is to continue to lead in this area.

While our campus social media traces the information from most of the day, below are a few selected areas I wanted to share. It will take the efforts of the entire region to make some of these visions a reality, as the community and its institutions provide the workforce, infrastructure and culture to encourage this innovation to happen in Seattle.

22666868995_b14e5d0ba3_kOren Etzioni, CEO of Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI), noted others have predicted that in the 20 year future the Internet will be accessed directly through your brain. He was cautious about such a statement, but did predict AI will play an advanced role in 20 years.

He predicted that personal driving in Seattle will be a hobby in 2035, not a mode of commuting. Great news! Traffic intersections will be dramatically changed as AI software will communicate and coordinate to allow cars to pass through without danger.

We will succeed in overcoming information overload and cut through the clutter, as science will be revolutionized by AI Assistants (not Siri or IBM’s Watson, but more like Holmes’ Watson).  Etzioni is launching Semantic Scholars next week as their first software at Allen Institute for AI.  He believes it is the absence of AI technologies that is already killing people through errors.  AI will not exterminate us; it is a tool that will empower us.

Augmented reality and virtual reality (VR) was another topic and we had 3 CEO pioneers: Bob Berry, co-Founder & CEO, EnvelopVR; Brian Vowinkel, Chief Revenue Officer, VRstudios; Forest Gibson, co-Founder, Pluto VR. VR Studios are rapidly moving to a full immersive and untethered experience and the prior limitations of tethers and nausea are rapidly disappearing.

The speakers stated VR has already become a legitimate immersive experience. Game engines are the driver to VR, and those companies are here and demanding high performance in computing power and hardware. With more revenue generated by games than all of Hollywood, VR is now ready to sell to consumers and businesses and will be a fundamental new computing platform and transformational technology for many industries.  Gaming will be the first “Killer App,” but medicine, imaging and communications will all follow.

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What will this look like in 2035, along with big data and other innovations?  Everyone may walk around with augmented reality glasses, feeding them an ‘annotated reality,” where all the information you need about your environment is provided instantly. Information from your environment will be surfaced before you even know you need or want it. We are absolutely heading for that future.

Additionally, the speakers predict less need for air travel given VR, as you will be able to design a product from multiple countries all in same virtual space, picking out material, etc.

As all this tech innovation brings us closer to the data, the roles of mainframes, Internet and smart phones will dramatically diminish, as the data you want and need is with you or integrated into you.  For tech-savvy people in 20 years, monitors, screens or TVs will be non-existent.  The VR revolution is moving fast – by the end of 2016, 30 different products in the next generation of headsets will be released.  Facebook recently acquired at high cost Oculus Rift, because it recognizes the power of a shared presence in a virtual environment.  If Facebook’s vision is for the most social experience possible, it means VR is the future.  In 20 years, its predicted that many people will wear VR glasses most of the time, creating their own VR identities. It may even be taboo to take off your glasses!  Finally these speakers reminded us that the drone phenomenon is only getting started – there will be drones everywhere!

Several speakers discussed the cities of the future. Amanda Sturgeon of the International Living Future Institute talked about the rapid progress in making buildings more sustainable.  David Kaplan from 1Energy Systems noted that the price of solar panels and lithium batteries is coming down and more accessible.  He noted the role the batteries of the future will have in leveraging wind and solar, and distributing it in more flexible and rational ways into the grid. Dr. Nitin Baliga from the Institute for Systems Biology talked about the world trends of more people and less water and arable land, and laid out his vision for the future of massive urban areas: sustainable aquaculture and aquaponics.  He is a world leader in engaging students and citizens throughout the world to participate as researchers in this effort – see www.systemsbiology.org/research/project-feed-1010.

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The talent development panelists: Cynthia Tee, Executive Director, Ada Developers Academy; Trish Dziko, co-Founder & Executive Director, Technology Access Foundation; Dan Shapiro, co-Founder & CEO, Glowforge; and Ruchika Tulshyan, Author, “The Diversity Advantage,” reinforced the need for our companies in technology area to contain more women and underrepresented minorities.  We at Northeastern-Seattle have been a regional leader in elevating this issue and helping form tech-community coalitions to do something about it. If we are able in the next 10-20 years to leverage this diversity gap, it will provide the talented workforce needed to fuel all the innovative initiatives we heard about at this conference.

Another area which our blog has examined in recent months is the “scientific wellness” revolution, which has been developed in our very own building by Dr. Leroy Hood and his associates at Institute for Systems Biology.  The P4 revolution, as he calls it (predictive participatory, preventive and personalized) has gotten underway with real demonstration projects, and has been spun off into a private entity called Arivale.

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Space was one of the afternoon topics that captivated all in attendance.  Speakers – Jason Andrews, CEO, Spaceflight; Nathan Kundtz, CEO, Kymeta; Joe Landon, CFO, Planetary Resources and Chairman, Space Angels Network; and Kraig Baker, Partner, Davis Wright Tremaine – talked about mini-satellites, mining asteroids, and the many ways our lives are already, and will increasingly in the future, be guided by items in space.  The venture capital community is now firmly convinced that investing in commercial space firms like the three we heard from makes good sense.  A new Gold Rush may be on.

Northeastern hosted this detailed look into the future, as that is what we are preparing our students for.  Many of them attended Seattle 2035, and my hunch is some of them will be our leaders of tomorrow.

– Dean Tayloe Washburn

Additional coverage of Seattle 2035:

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