I'd now like to shift to the vision of this year's conference and also focus on the theme of this conference, GIS creating a more intelligent world. And I suppose, well, I'd like you to remember back to the beginning, opening video with those young children. You know, without prompting, those children — these are children from a school in Redlands — without prompting, they had right away an answer for how to create a smarter world. Extraordinary. It touched me, actually. And, well, I'd like you, at the beginning of this conference, it's appropriate that you think about this phrase, GIS creating a more intelligent world, and what it means to you, and also what it means to your work.
Today, our world, like it has always been, is a living, interconnected ecosystem. It's the foundation for life, and it's actually the foundation for everything we know in this vast universe, this little living green ball. And it's evolving, and we're part of it. We're part of this ecosystem. Our civilization continues advancing, driven by the application of human science and innovation, and also by the sharing of information, whether it's the written language which was invented, or books, or printing presses, or now the Internet. It wasn't just the innovation. It wasn't just the great science that was done. It was also the ability to disseminate that knowledge, creating what I like to call collective knowledge that has improved nearly every aspect of human life. I mean, we are living at a time, extraordinary time. I keep thinking about my grandfather, who was born about the time of the Civil War. What a different world it is today, and all of these dimensions.
And at the same time, our world is facing today extraordinary challenges. I mean extraordinary challenges. The issues of climate change or its effect on environmental degradation, what's happening with the loss of nature, our human footprint, collectively what it means for changes in weather patterns. We'll hear about this today, what it means with extreme heat. I mean, most of you are conscious that last week thousands of people died in Europe because of extreme heat, and similarly across the world. These sorts of challenges are threatening our future, and this meeting is not about doom and gloom, it's about being aware of what's going on. These are threatening sustainability, a term I'll come back to with respect to your work a few times.
Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer and scientist, said this: we need a global intelligence that matches our global impact. He also said, we're too smart for our own good, but not wise enough for our own survival. I thought that quote was so extraordinary at this particular moment.
Addressing and overcoming — and I use the word overcoming purposely — these challenges will require actually the expanding of our knowledge, but I don't think knowledge is enough. It's also expanding of our collective intelligence, leveraging our best science, our best technology, our best people, and also working together, collaborating, and being smarter about our collective actions. Those young kids saw us and they got it right. We're not doing this. Intelligence. What is intelligence, actually? In talking about today's theme, I just want to articulate it: it's the ability to learn, understand, and act, applying information effectively. And you all in this room know something about this because you're intelligent, you're intelligent beings. You reason, you do problem solving in minor ways or in massive ways. You adapt. This is what it's like to be a human.
Today, GIS, particularly, together with AI, promised to expand our collective intelligence, a word that I'll come back to. It's not just the data, it's not just the knowledge, it's our ability to reason together. And certainly AI is an interesting technology because it's bringing our collective knowledge together as a tool that we can apply. However, it in and of itself is not enough. Geography, spatial thinking, something that I believe all of you understand intimately, are essential building blocks for collective intelligence. They are the content and the context. They provide that which help us organize and integrate and understand everything we know.
So exciting to me, actually. GIS and the geographic approach are helping our world. They're helping us create a more intelligent world, interconnecting, integrating everything, enabling understanding. And I know from your work, it's helping collaboration. And we'll see examples of this this morning and this afternoon, at many scales, and increasingly, this powerful combination is leveraging AI.
The geographic approach is familiar to most of you here in the room. It provides a framework and a process for collecting and sharing and applying geographic knowledge. It's helping you and your organizations, it's helping communities, and I would assert it's helping the world become smarter. This formal methodology, shown on the right, is also a foundation for creating collective intelligence. And it's advancing. I suppose most of you came here this week to hear about the latest technology advances. And it's good. I'm really excited about it, actually. There's more measurement. There's more Earth observation. There's stronger computing. There's big data computing. There's cloud computing. There's more access through mobile devices. All of that. And AI, the way I position it, is one of those elements that's accelerating the work that we do.
But also you'll notice that GIS users, you in this room particularly, are playing an important role in the evolution of this technology in the context of evolving society and evolving civilization. Your participation, your innovations, your suggestions about how to change and evolve and innovate this technology is playing a very important role. On one hand, AI is advancing GIS, providing our users new ways, and we'll hear a bit about this. It's not the end-all, but it's providing us new ways to create data, to analyze data, to automate processes, to even write code and even, I suspect, for many of you, learned. I'm learning how to learn in a different way, playing with it. And that's going to help all of us, I think. That's my sense.
Assisting, helping us become more intelligent. And it's leveraging these powerful tools that we'll hear about in a natural language, advanced analytics, digital reasoning at scale. But also, I want to point out that GIS is advancing AI, and we're a little bit unconscious of it. We're not really fully there, but it's beginning to happen. Why? How? Because it provides the content and context about everything. That's what makes it real. And how? Well, GIS with AI is helping individual workflows. We'll see a lot of that this morning with assistance and AI tools. It's also barely but beginning to help us build more intelligent systems, more responsive systems. And it's happening in all kinds of IT areas, and it's also happening with some of you here in this room.
And the third thing on the right side is we're seeing how by opening up geographic information to the whole world of agents and agentic ecosystems, we can make geography and GIS and the tools and the methods available to that interesting world where agents can communicate with humans and make a big difference. We'll learn about these and how we're working on them. It's not perfect, and we will make mistakes along the way. But we, as humans, will make those mistakes. I'm very certain of that.
And yet, the technology is not going to be enough to do this. You and your work, I think, are more important than ever. Envisioning, working together, sharing, having that culture, acting with purpose, doing it responsibly, and, above all, maintaining the trust and working with integrity. These are not unfamiliar to you. It's just, I'm saying, as we accelerate the work that we must do, those human activities are going to be more important than ever. And listen, I am an optimist about this. I was reluctant for a while. Then I started to realize, oh my gosh, it's going to be possible. Creating a dramatically more intelligent world is actually possible. A world that advances civilization and at the same time creates a sustainable future.
And why am I so confident? Because your work, those hundreds of maps and the thousands of efforts that you are doing provide me the evidence that it's absolutely possible to create a more intelligent world, to do what those young kids dreamt of. That's exciting to me. You agree?
Well, it'll be an adventure, and we'll work it together. And openness and frankness, like the kind of relationship that we've had for decades, is going to be one of the keys.
