Greg Lindsay's Blog

November 03, 2023  |  permalink

Dubai Business Forum: Strengthening Cities’ Relationship With Nature

Dubai Chambers invited me to speak at November’s Dubai Business Forum — a networking and dealmaking extravaganza where the (New) New Silk Road was literally being paved. I was fortunate to join the luminaries on stage in the “Future Theatre” — including former Wired editor Chris Anderson and roboticist David Hanson — to speak about strengthening cities’ relationship with nature.

I’ll spare you the details, but I did use this opportunity to ask two generative AI tools (Midjourney and Bing Image Creator) to help me visualize a “desert modern eco district” (as seen below) and a Sheikh Zayed Road without cars (impossible, as it turns out). It was bracing to see the limits of both our own and our tools’ imaginations.

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a 2022-2023 urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he leads The Metaverse Metropolis — a new initiative exploring the implications of augmented reality at urban scale. He is also a senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, a senior advisor to Climate Alpha, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative.

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