Is C-3PO coming to save us from climate change? AI + Climate & the future of our cities 🌏

I was honored to share the stage of The Economist alongside people like Michio Kaku, physicist, and Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia — My learnings on the recent Robotics, AI + Climate developments.

This week, I’m writing you from Paris where I’m attending one of Europe’s largest Deeptech conferences, Hello Tomorrow, for the 10th year consecutively. It is one of these gatherings of mostly PhDs talking about things you don’t understand but it is a humbling refreshing experience that we like to get once a year, to get our jab of “what’s the latest on Frontier tech”.

PS: I have seen this conference grow from one of my school friends founding it, to now being a global reference with investors and founders flying from all around the world to attend it (stay tuned, will share a few pictures next week to prove it).

🦾 Robots + Climate Tech

So for the past 2 months, my team and I researched the topic of AI + Climate Tech, to write a market map, a report, and a newsletter. Unfortunately, for the past month, so many things changed that the research we were about to share in this newsletter was not relevant anymore.

So we decided to make a video — a more agile format than a newsletter— to summarize our learnings and discoveries. Here you go:

🪲 AI + Climate — Here are 7 insights to remember from my talk at The Economist:

-While representing only 2% of the planet’s surface, cities emit 60% of GHG emissions

-2 billion individuals are projected to inhabit megacities in the developing world by 2100, mainly in Asia and Africa.

-The World Health Organization predicts +8 degrees (up to 50 degrees in some cities) temperatures due to climate change in the top 20 cities. That’s lethal heat without efficient air conditioning systems.

-The total value of global real estate is $21 trillion. It faces big write-downs due to climate risks.

-In Europe, 90% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are already standing today. To reach a net-zero built environment by 2050, we’ll need to invest $83 trillion to retrofit buildings.

-In 2023, 70% of investments in the built environment went to climate tech. This was a big jump from 20% fifty years ago.

-Michio Kaku believes that AI and quantum computing will soon enable us to reach the Solar Age, an age where humans will be able to harness the power of the sun and stop their city’s dependence on fossil fuels.

If we want to fix our relationship with the planet we need to fix our cities.

How will our cities’ energy, food, and water be produced, consumed, and recycled in 2040?

This is the challenge of our generation: to reinvent our cities to be greener and more resilient to climate-induced extreme weather.

I believe this Solar Age is right around the corner: using climate tech and AI, the future of our cities lies in fostering funding for solutions retrofitting our homes & production cycles.

Thanks everyone for reading.
With all the love, all the power: good luck, and speak again soon!