On 1 August 2025, Prof. Michael GOODCHILD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA gave the 42nd PAIR Distinguished Lecture on the topic of “Geospatial Futures”. The lecture reviewed the key developments and legacy practices in the evolution of GIS and revealed the forthcoming directions and future prospects in the field. In the Lecture, Prof. Goodchild briefly introduced the history of GIS, discussing how innovations in areas including measurements, naming conventions, computing, global positioning system (GPS) and locating-measuring technologies have combined to propel the development of GIS. According to him, the explosion of data and diffusion of advanced technologies, including machine learning, generative AI and digital twins in the modern era, would present multiple new technical problems to GIScience, including geographic bias, transparency of machine learning, environmental cost, and uncertainty in predictions, challenging the fitness-for-use of geographic systems built. He emphasised a new direction for GIS: the achievement of more powerful and cheaper computation for finer-resolution data, better models, machine learning and 3D photorealism. In illustrating the importance of computational breakthroughs for GIS, he shared several compelling examples of digital twin models that give virtual representations of physical landscapes such as volcanoes, coastal regions and urban environments. He also drew attention to the ethics of GIS, remarking that while software developers are maximising the use of general-purpose GIS packages, the public should exercise responsibility in using the software appropriately and repurposing it.
