For Earth Day, I asked AI to show me what the future looks like

For Earth Day, I asked AI a simple question: What will the planet's biggest cities look like 1,000 years from now based not on sci-fi guesses but on hard data already available today. I asked it to avoid sci-fi guesses, predictions of specific events or other fun ideas we humans like to impose on visions of the future and to stick to real data on long-term environmental trends. And it came back with some not-so-surprising results.

ChatGPT looked at established climate research, including *deep breath” IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, NASA Sea Level Change Portal, Met Office Climate Change Overview, World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Climate Reports, and so many more resources I'd never think to turn to. All of this outlined a broad direction over the next centuries rather than specific outcomes for individual cities.

From there, the AI focused on the big, measurable forces already reshaping the planet today, those climate changes we hear about, shrug and ignore, like rising sea levels, driven by warming oceans and ice loss, more intense rainfall and flooding and increasingly extreme heat, shaping how cities function at a basic physical level.

Of course, there's AI drift and hallucination in here, and just for now, I'm parking the ethical issues of AI. The contradiction of using AI and its carbon footprint isn't wasted on me, but as an experiment, I think it's an interesting glimpse into our future.

London

Shanghai

Mumbai

Paris

Lagos

New York