Award-winning innovators Caroline Lair and Lucia Gallardo will be speaking at TNW Conference, which takes place on June 15 & 16 in Amsterdam. If you want to experience the event (and say hi to our editorial team!), we’ve got something special for our loyal readers. Use the promo code READ-TNW-25 and get a 25% discount on your business pass for TNW Conference. See you in Amsterdam!
Social inequality and climate risk have become central to understanding what will drive innovation – and investment – for the future. On day two of TNW Conference, Caroline Lair, founder of startup and scaleup communities The Good AI and Women in AI, and Lucia Gallardo, founder and CEO of impact innovation “socio-technological experimentation lab” Emerge, will be on the Growth Quarters stage for a session titled “Technology-Driven Climate Justice.”
The climate crisis is itself the result of a deeply embedded and systemic exploitation of nature and people in the name of profit. Its impact is already being felt disproportionately over the world, with severe heat waves, droughts, and entire nations disappearing below sea level. What’s more, the people worst affected are those who have contributed little to the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.
Climate justice is the idea that climate change is not just an environmental but also a social justice issue, and aims to ensure that the transition to a low-carbon economy is equitable and benefits everyone. Lair and Gallardo will specifically speak about how technologies such as AI, blockchain, and Web3 can play a crucial role in addressing these issues.
AI for good
Artificial intelligence can be applied in the quest for climate justice in several ways, given that it is implemented in a way that ensures transparency, accountability, and fairness. These include data analysis and prediction, discovering patterns and informing policies, as well as evaluating their effectiveness.
It can also enhance climate modelling capabilities, crucial for developing adaptation strategies. Furthermore, AI-powered technologies can monitor, for instance, weather systems with real-time data and also optimise resource allocation and energy distribution.
Reimagining value
Emerge’s objective is to “reimagine impact innovation with regenerative monetisation models.” Regenerative finance goes beyond traditional models that focus on profit, taking into account broader social, environmental, and economic impacts.
Blockchain technology can, for instance, offer transparency for transactions, ensuring that funds are indeed directed to regenerative investments. It can also tokenise regenerative assets such as renewable energy installations, sustainable agriculture initiatives, or ecosystem restoration projects, representing them as digital tokens and making them more accessible to a broader range of investors.
Meanwhile, in the words of Gallardo, “Integrating crypto into existing ecological initiatives doesn’t automatically mean it is applied regenerative finance. We must be intentional about how we’re reimagining value.”
Reclaiming an equitable future
Why am I looking forward to this session? The theme of this year’s TNW Conference is “Reclaim The Future”. In all honesty, I belong to a generation that, while I hopefully have several decades more of on-earth experience ahead of me, will most likely not have to deal with full-on dystopian scenarios, battling to survive climate catastrophe.
I am also privileged in terms of geographical location and socioeconomic status not to have to worry about immediate drought and famine. (Flooding may be another matter, but as someone said when convincing me to move to Amsterdam – “wouldn’t you prefer to live in a place that is already used to keeping water out?”)
However, this does not mean that we who enjoy such privileges get to simply shrug our shoulders and carry on indulging in business as usual. TNW has always been about the good technology can do in the world. And what is better than employing it in service of one of the greatest challenges of our time?
The update introduces the latest prototype which shrinks the system somewhat from a large booth to a more streamlined setup that appears to use commodity depth cameras and fewer of them. Google says that makes the latest prototype “more practical,” and says that select companies are trialing the new version.
“Our earlier Project Starline prototypes took up an entire room, requiring complex hardware such as infrared light emitters and special cameras to create a live 3D model of the person you were talking to. While the results were impressive, the size and complexity of the system made it challenging to bring to many of today’s offices,” the company writes in an update on the project. “So for our latest prototype, we developed new AI techniques that only require a few standard cameras to produce higher quality, lifelike 3D images. Thanks to these advancements, our prototype now resembles a more traditional video conferencing system—going from the size of a restaurant booth to a flat-screen TV—that’s more deployable and accessible.”
Despite shrinking things down, Google confirms the system still uses a light-field display which creates a true 3D image without the need for glasses. However we still don’t know much about the specific display being used.
The entire premise behind Project Starline is that representing remote participants more realistically leads to better conversations. To that end the company recently pointed out several studies providing evidence that the system can bring “improved conversation dynamics, reduced video meeting fatigue, and increased attentiveness.”
