Thirty years ago this coming February, the world’s first high-profile showdown between human and machine intelligence happened. Not in Silicon Valley or on a Hollywood soundstage, but right here in Philadelphia.

IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer faced world chess champion Garry Kasparov at the then-new Pennsylvania Convention Center. The match coincided with the 50th anniversary of the University of Pennsylvania unveiling ENIAC, the world’s first programmable general-purpose computer. It was a reminder that Philly once helped the world step into the computer age.

Three decades ago, artificial intelligence felt theoretical. Today, it feels existential. And as Philadelphia prepares to host the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026, I’ve been wrestling with a simple question:

In a city rightly obsessed with its history, are we still willing to plan for the future?

Last month I published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, introducing a multiyear project to develop a shared, resident-informed vision for what Philly might aspire to be in 2276. 

The spark was lit in 2023 during Thriving, a reporting project on economic mobility that Technical.ly produced with support from the William Penn Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and the Knight Foundation. Our newsroom followed 10 Philadelphians for a year and hosted a dozen focus groups across the city to understand how economic mobility really works here.

During one of those conversations, a Brewerytown resident said something that stuck with me: “Leaders here talk a lot about hundreds of years in the past, but nobody is looking very far in the future.”

That comment resurfaced again and again. Across boardrooms, universities, nonprofits and regional corporate offices, too many leaders steward institutions founded by long-ago entrepreneurs, but rarely build what comes next. We optimize what exists instead of imagining what could be.

The US Semiquincentennial gives us an excuse to correct that imbalance.

If the future feels distant, the stakes are not

My career, and Technical.ly’s mission, has involved listening to and challenging the inventors, entrepreneurs, technologists and civic builders shaping tomorrow’s economy. They act while others analyze.

What would it look like for an entire city to act with that same future orientation?

Over the last two years, we’ve collected ideas from nearly 1,000 Philadelphians. We’ve gone to festivals, attended community gatherings, participated in neighborhood meetings and hosted small-group workshops. Our goal was simple: assemble a long-term, resident-driven vision that future leaders might use as a north star.

The result is a draft vision for 2276. Its current iteration lives at PH.LY. It’s not really a plan, and certainly not a prediction. It’s an invitation. It’s what we hope our descendants can count on far beyond our lifetimes.

And new insights keep coming. This fall, our creator-in-residence TaTa Sherise continued the conversation, asking people in Clark Park:  “What do you think Philadelphia will look like in 250 years?”

Their answers were strikingly consistent with the themes we heard in workshops:

  • A greener, safer city
  • Better transportation
  • More unity
  • Strong neighborhoods
  • A cultural identity that endures

And, as one very Philly interviewee added: “Cars will probably be flying by then.”

If the future feels distant, the stakes are not. Philadelphia faces potential population loss, climate pressure and rapid technological change. Yet many civic institutions still struggle to plan even a decade ahead.

During a recent private conversation I moderated in a beautifully preserved historic building, a local leader cited Philadelphia’s poor economic mobility ranking. I reminded him that the same warning was published a decade ago.

We didn’t act then. We have another chance now.

Building on our past without missing the mark

Philadelphia’s most transformative breakthroughs rarely came from insiders. They came from outsiders who pushed past the city’s gatekeepers, some of whom we’ve celebrated before:

  • Stephen Girard, a French immigrant dismissed by elites, stabilized the nation’s finances and endowed Girard College.
  • The Drexel family funded risky banking innovations that fueled the Industrial Revolution.
  • Albert Barnes curated beauty the establishment couldn’t see.
  • Mauchly and Eckert, the duo behind ENIAC, were a professor and grad student with entrepreneurial ambitions that Philadelphia didn’t support — a story that prefigured Silicon Valley.
  • Katalin Karikó, whose mRNA research helped yield the COVID-19 vaccines, found commercial backing in Boston, not here.

Philadelphia attracts visionaries but has a habit of ignoring them. That is not a strategy for the next 250 years.

But there are bright spots. The Delaware River waterfront is being reborn. The I-95 cap project is knitting neighborhoods back together. A generation ago, Philly’s tech community began emerging, and several unicorns followed.

Those builders helped shape this long-term vision effort too. The Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, which includes the William Penn and Connelly Foundations, invested $75,000 to support the process. The city’s 2026 planning director, Michael Newmius, has encouraged us to listen widely and avoid gatekeeping.

Across two years, we’ve had thousands of conversations. The resulting draft statement is not timid. It’s not filtered through incumbency. It has grit, humor and humanity, like the city itself.

You can read the full draft at PH.LY, but here is the heart of it:

We descend from those who declared freedom, those denied it, those who fought for it and those who defend it still. We hold fast to our grit, grace and good humor.

We remain a city of immigrants and makers, where hard work and honesty mix with creativity, invention and love of neighbor. We honor no tool before the people it serves. Hoagies endure.

Come what may, Philadelphians still walk, sit on steps and solve more problems than we create. We build to last and put art on the walls. From democracy’s many messy hands, we shape a freer, fairer, more human future.

They do not all love us, but they remember us. We will still boo you.

What happens next

Our goal is to enshrine the final vision statement on a physical plaque (or several) around the city and feature a digital version with resident voices. The statement won’t dictate policy or make predictions; it will offer a shared aspiration, a yardstick future leaders can use to judge their plans.

Early drafts referenced green energy, climate-adaptive agriculture and an innovation economy that “exports ideas and imports opportunity.” Over time, we removed specifics to keep the statement timeless. But the core belief remains:

Philadelphia must keep people — not technology, not incumbency — at the center of our future.

I love this city’s history. I was once a tour guide in Old City, and I bike past Independence Hall daily on my way to the Technical.ly newsroom. But nostalgia alone is not stewardship. Philadelphia is strongest when it pairs cobblestones with invention’s spark.

Read the draft at PH.LY. React to it. Challenge it. Add what only you can add.

We’re accepting feedback until Dec. 31.

The Kasparov–Deep Blue rematch is remembered as the moment a machine beat a human genius. But the first match, the one here in Philadelphia, ended with the human winning.

Let’s make sure that’s still true for our city.