Introduction
This is the sixth Nucleus. It should have been the eighth. This annual event was established in 2015 to examine and accelerate the advent of the new mobility. Before our enforced two-year break, Nucleus brought together the established car makers and the start-ups which sought to disrupt them, the legislators who regulate mobility and the investors who finance its reinvention. Each year we heard from those whose expertise ranged far beyond personal mobility – from AI to space exploration – and whose contributions were perhaps even more compelling as a result.
But the events of the past two years have disrupted even the disruptors. The few assumptions we thought we could make when Nucleus first convened have been upended, and not only by the pandemic. We thought then that the big tech firms would increasingly dominate the mobility space, for example, particularly if autonomy became the defining influence that many thought it would.
Instead, some believe that the titans of the tech age are themselves now threatened by the increasing decentralisation and digitisation of goods, interaction and finance. It is perhaps ironic that the themes that seem most pressing to examine as we meet in person for the first time since 2019 are those that make our life and work yet more virtual and disparate: blockchain and cryptocurrencies, the metaverse, and Web 3.0.
So, Nucleus is a little different this year. We have expanded the scope of our discussions from topics specifically relevant to the new mobility to those which now challenge almost every sector. But amidst the short-term havoc of the pandemic and the longer-term imponderables of our digital future, we must not lose sight of the most important, universal benefit of smarter mobility. In our final session we’ll hear how big businesses are keeping sustainability as their lodestar, even as all else shifts around it.
