The organisers of GITEX invited Matthew to keynote GITEX Technology Week 2018 at the Dubai World Trade Centre, the 38th event in the series and one of the world's largest future focused expos, with over 150,000 visitors from 120 countries and more than 4,500 companies. He headlined the main stage alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Opened on 15 October by Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Dubai Executive Council, the event filled 1.3 million square feet of halls with exhibitors from China and the US to Nigeria and South Korea, showing the latest advances in AI, blockchain, robotics, cloud and digitisation.
"In the next two decades the transportation industry will change more than it has in the past thousand years."Matthew Griffin, Dubai, October 2018
Matthew was asked to take the audience on a journey through time and space and shine a light on the future of transportation up to 2040. The topic was especially pertinent as the UAE works to diversify its economy away from oil and prepares to welcome upwards of 50 million tourists a year as part of its Vision 2030 programme.
He covered the death of the car, the rise of flying taxis, and autonomous battery-less pods and vehicles that design and then 3D and 4D print themselves. He also discussed the electrification of the industry, trains that travel at 2,500 miles per hour, and travelling from one side of the planet to the other in just 30 minutes, leaving the audience with a picture of a transport system that will change more in the next two decades than in the past thousand years.
