Pieter van de Glind and Harmen van Sprang, the co-founders of shareNL (a knowledge and networking platform for the Netherlands) and Sharing City Alliance (a global organization facilitating the interconnection of cities), are passionate advocates for the sharing economy’s potential to transform cities. The business partners hail from Amsterdam, which incorporates the sharing economy into many aspects of everyday life, from peer-to-peer energy marketplaces to Park Fly Rent, a company that facilitates outgoing travelers in Amsterdam renting their cars to incoming tourists. “Digital is changing real behavior,” van de Glind said. “We see this through the sharing economy.” According to van de Glind, the first iteration of the global sharing economy revolved around social sharing, and then moved toward efficiency. Many sharing economy enterprises in the Netherlands, if not Europe overall, are social enterprises, founded by individuals who have goals beyond making money. Van Sprang sees these sharing economy platforms as empowering people. “As soon as people know they can be empowered through technology, there’s no going back,” said van Sprang.

Jonathan Tourtellot, the CEO of Designation Stewardship and a longtime veteran of National Geographic, effectively illustrates the concept of “overtourism” by pouring a bright red liquid into an overflowing vessel. When transatlantic commercial flight began in 1958, Tourtellot explains, there were 25M annual international tourist arrivals, but by 2010, that number had topped more than one billion. “It’s often said that tourism is the fire that can cook your food or burn your house down,” said Tourtellot. While tourists can help protect historic and scenic areas through their economic support, downsides of this massive industry—which accounts for around 10 percent of global GDP—include pollution and irreparable damage to local cultures. In Tourtellot’s perspective, sustainable tourism means more than recycling and staying in LEED certified buildings. “To be truly sustainable, you want to protect the character of the place that people are coming to see,” Tourtellot said. He believes that staying in someone’s home through platforms like Airbnb or Couchsurfing generates a lighter environmental footprint than staying in conventional hotel. For example, Greek islands like Santorini have to build additional facilities to handle increased sewage and water needs for two months of peak tourism demand, which Greek taxpayers understandably aren’t particularly interested in paying for. If tourists can stay in the homes of locals, this helps mitigate some of the stress on the local population and environment.

Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta, may spend his days “slinging money around,” as he phrases it, discovering and investing in hot new artificial intelligence (AI) startups, but he devotes much of his free time helping to imagine and plan for the future of work. These aren’t unrelated pursuits—Bahat says that AI gives him the feeling that the future is coming towards us more and more rapidly in a way he hasn’t experienced in other tech trends. Bahat defines AI as “a class of techniques that allow you to predict, using software,” and has strong convictions about the imminent ubiquity of AI. Very soon, anything that has a chip in it is going to have some ability to predict, says Bahat. He sees a false dichotomy in the argument about whether AI will augment humans or replace them. Anything that complements us replaces some things we do, Bahat argues.

Rachel Botsman, world-renowned trust expert and University of Oxford lecturer, has a new book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart, explores questions of transparency, scale, and ownership that are at the heart of the sharing economy. Botsman says she “became obsessed with understanding how strangers could trust one another through technology,” from apps and platforms like Uber and Airbnb to the dark web. Seemingly paradoxically, technology is facilitating trust between strangers at the same time as trust in institutions is eroding globally. Botsman argues that the narrative that trust is imploding is problematic—this tends to worsen the problem, Botsman says, and we’re naturally a pretty trusting species. One upside to the reinvigorated conversation about trust is that we now see trust as an asset that needs to be protected, not a given.

Paul Hawken asks, "Can we stop global warming in the next 30 years?" According to renowned environmentalist, the answer is yes. We can keep the temperature of the Earth from rising past the critical mark of two degrees Celsius and actually draw down carbon out of the atmosphere to reverse the warming by 2050. We were privileged to have the opportunity to host the first public event around the book launch of Project Drawdown, which was our best-attended What’s Now event ever and ended in a standing ovation for Paul.

Sunil Paul took his first ride in an autonomous vehicle (AV) in 2009—at least a decade before most of will have the opportunity. That ride inspired to think about the future of transportation. Just two years later, in 2011, Sunil co-founded Sidecar, where he also served as CEO. Sidecar invented the modern ride-sharing model, operated in ten U.S. cities and gave millions of rides before selling the company assets to GM in 2016.

Ken Goldberg, William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair of Engineering at UC Berkeley, doesn’t buy into the prevailing robot panic of our times. His experience running a robotics lab suggests that AI and robots will empower humans, not replace them. “The important question is not when machines will surpass human intelligence, but how humans can work together with them in new ways,” Ken wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. Rather than fearing the Singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, Ken encourages us to focus on what he calls Multiplicity, which he defines as “diverse groups of people and machines working together to solve problems.” Multiplicity characterizes much of the recent innovation at Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Uber, where input from people plays a central role.

Julian Agyeman, a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, believes that social justice and environmental justice are—or at least, should be—inextricably intertwined. The question we need to be asking, Agyeman says, is how do we improve people’s lives in a just and equitable manner, and how do we do that while living in the limits of supporting ecosystems? Agyeman cites research that demonstrates the link between social justice and environmental protection, adding, “Maybe the way we treat each other can be indicative of the way we treat the environment.” He also speaks about the corrosiveness of income inequality, and the link between income inequality and a nation’s carbon footprint. Agyeman advocates for increased “joined up” thinking in the global North, particularly the US and Europe, that doesn’t separate issues of social justice from issues of environmental justice. He highlights a program called Clean Buses for Boston that sought to tackle both pollution and high rates of asthma in a lower income neighborhood being disproportionately affected by CO2-belching buses.