 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the stage artist and futurist, Zenka. So your seatbelts, here we go. I wanna start with this. Why are we here today, preserving things and talking about how we can do it really well? I assume that we're doing it for these four reasons, right? It's entertaining. It's really fun. It's fascinating. The past is fascinating. We also do it because it's incredibly inspiring, right? The people who have gone before us have redefined what's possible. They punched the ceiling out and we've come in their footsteps. We also do it because it's healing, right? How can we look at the future when we're mad or we're sad, right? So that's really important too. And we also do it for the wisdom, right? We wanna pass on ideas to generations that are coming next. So as you know, we're living in information overload, right? It's almost too much to take. We're even worried that our kids won't be curious anymore because information is everywhere. But when you move up to knowledge, you start to realize that you can think of knowledge as like a map, a physical map in your brain, right? It's not only where information goes, but it's your ideas and your expectations and your beliefs, right? And your predictions. If I do this, this will happen. And wisdom is that on a larger scale. It's a bigger map. It's how we do things as a whole, right? And it's this transgenerational decision making that we wanna make. So at the last conference I was at, a futurist, Ted Shilowetz, asked everybody to take out their cell phones, hand it to their neighbors, and he asked those people to put the cell phone in their pocket. People were extremely uncomfortable, right? And so it just goes to show you, I mean we're living in a new world, right? We're stepping hand in hand into something together, right? And humans are really good at creative thinking. We're good at emotional thinking. And we're good at taking bits of information and seeing how they correlate, right? And computers, on the other hand, are good at organizing big maps, right? They're good at coordinating all the people from around the world, right? And they're good at connecting us. So as you know, my name is Zanka. I am both a preservationist and a futurist. And I work at looking at exponential technology and fundamental thinking to improve the outcome of the future. And today I'm gonna talk to you about the four-dimensional map, right? This time-space map. It's the library or the search engine or the index. You know, the marketing people had no idea what to call it. So we call it the adventure platform, the research, the prediction, the education platform. I'm gonna talk to you guys about it from its creation around the year 2018 all the way up until today, the year 2028. So you can think of it, right? As taking all of the things, right? The movies, the books, all these buildings that we preserved and the objects and putting it onto the earth, right? And then adding a layer, a dimension of time, right? So you can go down on the map and go back in time and up and go forward in time, right? You can see what was happening around you, what books and movies and things were published at that time. You can curve around the earth and see what was happening in Russia at the same time. And of course, it allowed us to see things from a 360-degree view, right? So how did we see the Vietnam War from every single country on the earth, right? How did we see it 10 years before it happened, 10 years after it happened, 20 years after it happened? And this tool also allowed us to shop for knowledge, right? We were able to look at all the movies, all the sounds, all the fashion that were created at that time and save them for later. If the beginning of jazz interests us, we could put those things in our movie quay to watch later. The thing that I most loved about the 4D map was this ability to have a personal notebook. We realized we were living in an age where things were changing so much that we needed to become lifelong learners, right? We couldn't stop learning after high school or college, but we needed a digital notebook to keep notes on the theories we were working with and the questions and where we'd been in history. And we also needed a collaborative platform, right? We wanted to be able to collaborate all these questions that we had. And of course, the most popular thing that we did on this 4D map and that we do today is when the haptic suits and virtual reality really came into being, right? And we would create these fears, right? Where we would go into a simulation. And as you guys know, this was the first time we were able to create actual memories of history that we never even lived through, right? Because as you know, in virtual reality, your brain processes information as if it's coming through your eyes. You're having a physical memory of doing something and your brain is recording memories deeply because you're in a special place, right? So we are, for the first time, able to feel history, not just read about it. So I wanna congratulate and thank all the people who came together over the last year to recreate the Chicago World's Fair for this conference, right? We're bringing back an event that happened 120 years ago, right? And we did it over the course of a year and it launched this year in 2027. Now, when this happened, it was considered the most spectacular attraction in the world at that time. People from every single age group and economic background came, 27 million people came here and all of the countries showed the latest and greatest of what they had. And when we created it, you know, we had the 3D models, but we had to do more than that. We had the objects, right? We already had those scanned in. We had the beautiful architecture, but we had to add the objects, right? We had to let people order those on Amazon. And we needed to put people in there, right? We got 4,000 reenactment volunteers, some of them from Chicago, some of them from Gettysburg that we learned about the history, right? And they came and they became virtual avatars and staffed it 24 hours a day for three months, right? We also had 13,000 chatbot, virtual reality, AI-powered performers, right? And then of course, 16 million everyday people who came to experience it. We had virtual souvenirs, people taking home woolly mammoths. And my personal highlights were hearing the first voice recording from the Edison machine, right? And like, body still hurts from trying to learn how to belly dance in the street of Cairo, right? And then there's the super washer-upper, right? The very first dishwasher invented by a female inventor. And I also liked attending as different people, different age groups, different classes. And this, you know, no joke. My parents said, we're so glad you're working on this because did you know your great-grandmother and great-great and great-great-great-grandmother all went to this? They were part of the 27 million people that had gone. The biggest attractions, of course, were the very first Ferris Wheel. And then Captain Creeper, 85, way back in the year 2016, had recreated all 200 buildings in Minecraft, pixels, right? And he allowed everyday everybody to come in and take the buildings apart and put them back together, okay, how's that for learning architecture? Of course, Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley stole the show like they did way back then. So we always look at where people go after they leave the simulation, right? On the timeline map, right? And a lot of people, of course, they just took the ships from the simulation off to Europe, right? And they also went back 400 years and took the ships back to the US. They took the railroads in Chicago and started exploring the historical present from that time, 1893, across the US. They also went back in time 20 years. They wanted to see the fire of Chicago, right? The 18,000 buildings that got destroyed. And they wanted to go forward in time and go to the Venice Biennale and other things. We started a lot of collaborative research. You guys all probably participated in some of it. We started to compare the Industrial Revolution to the Robotics Revolution, right? In talking about eight hour workday versus the four day work week that we have today, right? And we wanted to know why the other world's fair failed. We're still theorizing about that. And we're also talking about doing another one for the future, right? So we can invite everybody today to learn about the latest and greatest technology that we have at our disposal. And we also ask the question, do people have cultural experiences in virtual reality? Are they more curious in real life to have other cultural experiences? We had almost half of million media checkouts in the form of books and music. So I wanna go back to the year 2017, 2015, about there, right? Let's go back. You know, we had the library, right? It looks like this. It wasn't digital. You couldn't reconfigure it based on the questions that you had that moment, right? And it didn't include media types. It didn't include fashion. It didn't include music. This, believe it or not, this is what our search engines looked like back then, right? It wasn't able to visualize data, right? We wasn't organized on time and place, which we know we needed to do. And as my son says, you can't even navigate it using a ship, right? It's flat. So we started to understand that time was a dimension, right? It was a contextual filter by which we could understand the world. And if we changed that vantage point, we changed our understanding of history itself and what had happened. So at that time, we really didn't have any personal research tools that could help us, like I said, come up with new ideas and theories and trace our journey. And people at that time, they wanted to observe. They didn't want to be told what to think or what happened in history. They wanted to get in there and make up their own minds, right? They wanted to stop being disconnected and start being engaged. And they also wanted collaborative tools. There was nothing out there. Today, we can write a thesis using computers and 1,000 people, right? Citizen historians, citizen preservationists can all come together and work on a big project together. You know, the preservation tools were ridiculous. You know, we started with cave drawings. We go into drawings. Then we have photographs. And the scanning technology back in 2017 was still pretty expensive, right? So new tools arrived, right? We had haptic suits. We had virtual reality. We had augmented reality. We had world building tools. You know, we had the non-organics, right? The computers were there to help us at last. You know, cell phone scanners. We were moving preservation into the wisdom age, right? We were giving things more contextual relationship, interdependencies, influence. We're starting to see things differently. And all of our goals and passions started to deepen in ways that we didn't even imagine. So I want to talk about the lead-up to the four-dimensional map, right? So, you know, in the year 2000, we had people starting to experiment with scanners, right? Like Epic Scan and Architectural Resources Group, they were lugging up 200 pounds of LIDAR scanners to try to get these buildings scanned. And we had geniuses, right? That were like, like, Jimmy Whales creating open-source crowdsourced encyclopedias? I mean, that was a crazy idea. But it was beautiful, and it worked. Okay, we had people trying to build virtual worlds. In 2012, we had holographic Holocaust victims that you could ask any question to. They had almost 20,000 responses ready to go based on whatever you wanted to ask. You know, Google Tango was starting to understand how a small cell phone could understand depth using 3D sensors. We were starting to scan and print things in 3D. The Cultural Institute of Google was taking all of the museums and all the cultural artifacts and seeing what could be done. We can also then plot it by time, which obviously, you know, for the data geek in me, it's very fascinating, and you can spend hours looking at every decade and the contributions in that decade and in those years for art, history, and cultures. You know, we would love to spend hours showing you each and every decade, but we don't have the time right now. So you can go on your phone and actually do it yourself. But... We were starting to add augmented reality sculptures next to regular sculptures, right, of things that had happened in history that were missed, right? And we had these things like the paper monuments that Brian talked about. We're starting to have massive amounts of 3D objects available to look and touch and hold and move around and try on. And we were starting to have consumer cell phones have the scanning capability in the depth sensors, right, and that completely changed the equation. You know, 23 and me started showing people that their DNA included Neanderthal. Like, I'm 2% Neanderthal, right? People started realizing the genetic code in their body had all of their great-grandmothers all the way back through, you know, through time, right? People wanted the historical stories to go along with that. And there was a renewed interest in history and preservation. In 2019, we had a big celebration. We launched the 4D map. And we started to have things like startups, like EV realities, start to be able to do on-demand collaborative crowd-participate-to-patient preservation with 360 cameras. We'd say, oh, there's a storm coming in. Let's preserve that. We'd send a call out to everybody and you'd start getting hundreds of people starting to scan and preserve a certain environment. And then Brittany Haller started the before movement, right? We started to say, like, where do we need, where do we need to document, right? They started to realize that images of before a war and putting those two images together was a really powerful statement. By 2020, we had 900 registered users. Things were still moving fairly slowly, but we had 100 people that were crowdsourcing theories on preservation and history. In 2021, we had the Airbnb Rite of History where people could drop their cell phones and be given costumes and food of the time period and they could totally immerse themselves in another place in these incredible buildings that we'd worked so hard to preserve. By 2021, all of the major content providers were giving us leads into their data, right? So then we could really shop for knowledge in a way that we hadn't before. And in 2020 to StoryCorps, this incredible project to record thousands and thousands of oral histories were now available at every bus stop, right? So you could start listening, what happened here? You start listening to stories of what happened around you at that given moment. By 2026, people didn't want to go to the movies. They wanted to immerse themselves in the story world themselves. Things were starting to change. And as you know, by 2026, historians and preservationists were starting to help us make good decision about our present, right? When was history repeating itself? What could we look at that could change the outcome of a very pressing presence? So I wanna close by taking a look at where we are in time, right? You know, humans just got here, right? Just barely got here. And we've gone through these ages, right? These paradigm shifts, right? They're coming faster. We're basically experiencing for the first time this idea of exponential change, right? That things are moving much more quickly than we had ever, ever imagined. This is discoveries on the periodic table. Okay, we're discovering, I think four more were added this year. This shows you visually the speed at which we've been able to travel over time, right? So we've ran, that's for 200,000 years. It's the fastest we could go. Then we rode horses for 5,000 years. That's the fastest we could go. And then all of a sudden we invented the car, right? And then we've gone to outer space, 18,000 miles per hour, right? So this is what that looks like. And if we add back in the running, whoops, we're there. You guys were born in this small circle. So let's come back down to today, right now, 2017. We are about to bring preservation and history into a very personal world, right? Because digitization allows us to do that, right? For the first time ever. And we also are gonna swing things back into the big picture, right? So that the work you're doing locally together combines into a bigger, more interesting story, right? We, it is our role to bring other experts to the table, right? The technical people that are figuring all this technology out, right, are in their basements and they're just excited that they've got it working, right? And you guys over here have this beautiful why of why you're doing that, right? And if we get everybody to the table, we can really make magic happen, right? We can give this technology a purpose and a path forward, right? And we also have to keep in mind that the preservationists that are gonna be coming along in five years are gonna be everyday people, right? They're gonna have their cell phones. They're gonna be telling stories. They're gonna be preserving what's important. So if we're gonna be pouring exponential technology and rocket fuel, we wanna make sure that we're not doing that on the world we have today, right? We don't want the world's day times a thousand. We wanna make some adjustments, right? And then scale that up, right? So if we're moving this fast on this bullet train, right? Our navigational system and the choices and the decisions that we make are critical. And that's why I want all of you guys in the cockpit, right? You can synthesize the past. You could help us make better decisions. By bringing up context and bringing up understanding, we can bring the world into the wisdom age. Thank you.