935: Global Issues Accelerated by AI (with Solutions), feat. Stephanie Hare

24:41That's a tool. Fine. Do I need to regulate that or do I want to regulate ways that I could use this fork? So I started just, you know, it's that classic thing when you get hired by somebody like, you know, give me 32 ways that you could use a brick. I was like, give me 32 ways and I could use this fork. You could use the fork for eating, but I could also like literally stand right next to you and like stab your hands or your eye or something, or, you know, go for the jugular and murder you. So two totally like valid use cases, one of which we definitely want regulated. You should not murder anyone or indeed cause bodily harm.

25:16A fork being one of the ways you could do that. So that's what I want to regulate. No killing, no stabbing, none of the harming. We don't have to regulate forks. Forks are free of regulation in this particular weird use case that I'm coming up with here because I want you to come up with all the ways you could use a fork.

25:36Jon Krohn:In the UK, at least knives are regulated though. That's interesting. I mean, that's my problem here. I know. I think about that a lot too. And I think that's also, I think that's probably why in the U S guns are so, are so lightly regulated because so many people use them to eat. Well, I can't talk about the second amendment. I plead the fifth.

26:00That's an inside American joke. Yes. First amendment versus the fifth, always so tricky when talking the second. And yeah, I just look, we all want to innovate, but we also want to be safe. And we just kind of want like a hopefully nonviolent, non-killing life if we can. So what I was trying to come up with was ways to get people thinking about it. Because again, if you go down a technical route, people can get psyched out when talking about regulation. The lawyers get involved. It's very messy for everyone. But if you take it back to like, how would you discuss this with kids? Because we're all kids on the inside.

26:34For me, it was four. So I'm like this, I could do this with it. I could do that with it. One of them we want to regulate, one of them we don't. And I want you to do all the other things you want to do with the fork, as long as you are not doing these things. And those things should probably actually be quite minimal, you know, like the 10 commandments, easy to remember and follow for a reason. So we probably want to regulate as lightly as possible. But when we regulate, we want it to be very clear. Everybody understands it and easy to enforce. It's very clear if I'm stabbing you or not, right?

27:03Like this should not be ambiguous. Hopefully.

27:06Jon Krohn:Hopefully. Yeah. So moving on from these kinds of general technology ethics ideas to now things that are newer than covered in your book. So talking about Gen.ai a bit, for example, long before the rise of Gen.ai as a society, we've grappled with the commercial transformation of our physical places and those that we visit as tourists or as civilians in a city into uniform, inauthentic and even low quality but efficient experiences like fast food. And sociologists have called this things like Disneyfication or McDonaldization. And we go from having these diverse town centers to kind of strip malls.

27:52Jon Krohn:and with the advent of the internet our digital spaces went from the kind of serendipitous chaos but unapologetically honest spaces of the early internet like geocities and myspace to today's ad infested low attention span fakeness of social media even news media um and uh so there's a canadian writer named cory doctorow or doctor off um depending on how long that person's family has been in canada i guess um and uh the word that he uses i actually can't say on this show because if i well i can i guess i can swear but we have to bleep it out it's a clean show uh so i'll call it and poopification, but instead of poop, you used a word that rhymes with hit.

28:51Jon Krohn:And I think you are familiar with that term because your head was nodding. I started to mention Corey Doctorow. And so now in the age of Gen AI, that was a very long intro to my question. Now in the age of Gen AI, it's estimated that in a few short years, the lion's share of internet content will be AI slop, low quality AI generated content. last week at the time of us recording the Harvard Business Review, I think, did a big, really popular story on AI slop, even in enterprises, where like so many of the emails and presentations that people are now being forced to go through are machine generated and nobody even proofread it, or it's not even necessarily aligned with a human in the organization's views, but it's wasting tons of time internally.

29:31Jon Krohn:So with that now in our midst, how can we, I don't know if you have any ideas. You probably have lots of thoughts on everything that I've said, so I should give you the opportunity to say that. But then how can we break this pattern and preserve diverse, authentic, thoughtful conversations and experiences in the future? Where to even start? I sometimes think we have to go back to a very basic question of what is the internet for? I loved your hearkening back to the Halcyon days. I wonder if it was though, my understanding is that the internet is largely a vehicle for pornography. So like, is, is the internet, you know, is the internet so useful as all of that?

30:14Um, and no judgment on that. I'm just, I'm just here to relay the message. So there's that. Then there's what everybody's doing. I don't know the analysis. As you were saying this, I was thinking about how I used to be a power user of Twitter before it was acquired by Mr. Elon Musk. And I sometimes felt bad about this. I needed it for my job. It was actually very useful for a very long time. And then there was a period where I think it was less useful and quite addictive for me. And then Elon Musk bought it and it really became less useful, but I stayed on it as a sort of like a smoker analogy.

30:49I was just using it.

30:50Jon Krohn:Yes, we have this. This came up in our research, not only the smoky analogy, but you've in the past, you've likened Twitter to an old fashioned smoking lounge in a Frankfurt airport, expensive, dangerous and stinky that's a quote jesus where did i say that publicly um i'm definitely thinking i stand by that statement by the way i do yeah because everyone's just shouting and screaming at each other and there is so much crap and it's even worse now so i was actually very grateful to mr musk in the end because i've been wanting to kick my twitter habit for a while or my ex habit for a while and he made it so useless for me that it was very easy to delete my account i was like do you know what?

31:30I actually don't need this anymore. Thank you. This used to be really important to me. And I'm not a smoker, but I have friends in my life who are, and they've said that smoking was very difficult for them to quit. Sometimes it has a use for them when they're stressed or they're out in a bar or a club and they really want to have a cigarette and it's hard for them. And I sympathize. And I felt that way a little bit with social media, which we know is engineered to make you addicted. And I'm just saying, I sometimes think we know that social media is bad for you. We know that being online is probably really bad for you and for democracy, et cetera.

32:04And I sometimes wonder, maybe the only way to get everybody offline is for the internet, just let it burn itself down. It becomes really bad. And then we'll all just be like, do you know what's going to be more useful? Like in that world where it's all, you know, burning and it's, you know, go to Demerung time is going back to books and the library and in-person meetings and seminars and education and like the things that we used to do before this whole thing started. Like some of us are old enough to remember what this world looked like. It was not so bad in some ways. So I don't know. I mean, you're catching me on a sort of touchy night, clearly, but I'm just saying, I'm not convinced that the internet has always been so amazing.

32:45It has been for obviously wonderful things. We're talking digitally across the internet's fabulous, but let's not fool ourselves. There's always been a bunch of stuff that's really awful. The dark web is a complete cesspool. And it's also never been equal for everybody. Like some people have been having great experiences online and some people have been having terrible experiences online the entire time. It's just that now all of us are. And AI has like at least democratized what Mr. Doctorow has termed his end-peepification. Spot on. So the question is, if the internet's good to move on to solutions, what do we want to do?

33:24what worked for us and what didn't. So there's like Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a new book out where he's talking about what he, why he built the World Wide Web as he did, why he made it like a public resource. He was not somebody who was building for profit first, right? He had a different motive and thank goodness for him and his crew. He's got a whole other plan. I'm sure other people will only get involved if they find there's a way to make money from that. So there's that. It's an opportunity for us to completely rethink what we want from the internet if we make this version really bad, but it has been really bad for a long time.

34:04Jon Krohn:It looks like that book is called This Is For Everyone. Is that the book that you're talking about? Yeah. The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web. Yeah. And I think he's, you know, he's an absolute visionary and he's thinking about technology in a really different way than what we've been discussing so far like driven by the profit motive and maybe there's maybe there's somebody out there who's got more cash who wants to help back something like that i am worried though like based on human history we'll probably have to like completely destroy the internet for people to then be willing to do this because right now it still serves quite a lot of people and first of all we all can shop online and do the stuff we want to do.

34:44But second, it's very useful for businesses and governments and people who want to inflame emotions and all that stuff.

34:49Jon Krohn:You know, I wonder if there's kinds of things that people could be doing as individuals, like as individual listeners, I wonder if there's things that they can be doing to make their internet experience better. So for example, something that I've been doing for a long time that has vastly improved my experience of the internet is using an ad blocker, which is free and just there in your browser. And it stops a lot of ads. And there's things like if I go on, uh, I only go on Instagram in a desktop web browser because they only serve ads in the phone version of Instagram because they have, yeah, they have so few users of Instagram on desktop that they're just, they don't cater to that for advertisers at all.

35:34That's a useful tip. Yeah.

35:35Jon Krohn:Even the, like the, the Instagram shorts, what are they called? Isn't it stories? Stories. Yes. Stories. Is it reels? Exactly. Stories. That's it. Yeah. The reels are just all videos, I guess, that are in the timeline. Anyway, but yeah. So, you know, those are, those are kind of helpful. Something else that I have personally really enjoyed as something that's been useful to me in terms of not getting stuck in this news cycle, this kind of fear-based news cycle that it seems like a lot of news reporting is based on. I think it might be a bit different in the UK, especially with outlets like the BBC and all of those ethical codes that the civil servants working at the BBC have gone through that you talked about earlier in the episode.

36:22Jon Krohn:It does seem like you're getting a lot more information relative to kind of junk or just stuff that's designed to inflame your emotions. but uh in the us where i live today a lot of you know the the news stations are actually like this podcast they're ad supported and so the objective is to keep people engaged as much as possible we try on this podcast to do it with great informative conversations but a lot of a lot of news shows have learned that the way to keep people engaged is through fear and emotions. And that seems to be good for their bottom line. So I'm working my way to a solution here is that one thing for me is that I subscribe to a physical subscription of The Economist, and there's still ads in this physical Economist magazine that I get.

37:20But I think because you're,

37:22Jon Krohn:I don't know, you're a paying customer as opposed to just relying on ads, you're getting, I think you're, you're getting deeper coverage, more thoughts on things. And well, actually we were talking about how to make the internet better. And I'm saying by not by getting a physical coffee. Um, yeah, so I don't know. I don't know. But anyway, maybe, maybe me giving those couple of examples, give some ideas for ideas that you might have for listeners on what they can do to make their experience on the internet better. Oh man, I'm super nervous about recommending anybody doing anything because I don't particularly feel I have an example of a life to follow.

38:02What I would just say for myself for what it's worth and putting it out is I try to really be intentional. When I'm on, it's because I'm researching usually and my research tastes and interests are super eclectic. So I'll be looking at all sorts of stuff and I often used to use social media as like a bulletin board. So I would just be, you know, very rarely would you get my views on anything. I was more just sort of posting for myself articles that I would then go back and look at or wanting to mark them. And that started from my time as a political risk analyst when I had to cover the entire European Union and the ECB and the European Commission and then EU relations to the wider world.

38:44I needed a place to file all of that. And at that time, Twitter was super useful back in 2010. And I carried that on when I started doing technology work full time.

38:56now now i want my brain back uh and that's been a very active and intentional process so all of the apps are not on my phone anymore i have to if i want to go online to surf around i have to do that on my phone if i'm you know using google i will have to go i go to the website of a newspaper and i will read the newspaper i don't want the social media curated experience anymore of that at all. And I'm trying to stay away from anything that makes me, which is difficult, because I'm still a US citizen, and I'm living in the UK, where we're having some very interesting political conversations at the moment.

39:33But seeing things that are inflammatory, make you angry and upset, sometimes that's an appropriate response to stuff. But as you've said, outrage every day is just making certain protégarks really rich and making the rest of us really stressed and anxious and not working with our communities to solve problems. So I'm trying to just be away from that. And I spend a lot of time reading books and in libraries or in archives or out with people. I spend more time now with people, I would say, than I ever used to before. And that is a very deliberate correction. I travel a lot for my job. So when I say I'm like, just hanging out with people, with my friends and I'm checking in because that would be a bubble.

40:19So I spend a lot of time, particularly going around France and Germany. That's been my focus for the past couple of years here in the UK. I go back to the US a lot. I've been flying to the Middle East a lot to have conversations there, have good research opportunity, will travel. I want to be on the ground because I would often see, my mom would call up and be like, oh my God, where you are? It's so violent. I'm watching it on CNN. I would be like, I'm literally here. I don't know where you are watching this. CNN has found the one place where somebody has set a garbage can on fire, but I am here and like, everybody's chilling out.

40:50And so I felt a bit like president Trump, I think is feeling at the moment where he's like, is Portland in a civil war outrageous scenario? Or am I watching something from 2020, right? Like, am I seeing reality? And it must be actually very hard for a president to give him the benefit of the doubt. He can't just go and like fly to Portland and check it out. Right. Like, you know, he's relying on his people. I don't have that as a researcher. I can go anywhere. And so I'm trying to do that much more and it's time consuming. It's expensive. It means my research is slower, et cetera, but it means I'm really grounded now and what I'm seeing and hearing, and I have other people on the ground as part of my network where they're telling me, they're like, no, that's not what's happening here.

41:34Or yeah, you need to get over here and check this out.

41:36Jon Krohn:I like that answer a lot. It had lots of useful tips in it. I like how you started it with, I don't know if I'm going to have any tips, but then you ended up having tons in there. Are they tips? Like, is that actionable? Like go travel around and like, just go see stuff, but go take a look around for yourself. Just coach, you know, go see it. I'm going to be in Chicago soon. I'm super interested to go and see what's happening there because as a former Chicagoan, albeit of a suburban nature, but still Chicago is always in my life and in my heart. And I want to see, like, are there federal agents running around with masks pulling people off the streets?

42:13Because that's what I'm seeing on social media. But I will be able to go and see it for myself and perhaps film it for myself very soon. And like that, as a citizen, I need to decide how upset I'm getting or not. And I need to know that what I'm seeing is what I am seeing. That's what I think is tricky now because of AI, is we don't know if what we're seeing is real anymore. Welcome to the metaphysics part of the show. Yeah.

42:38Jon Krohn:The, the travel thing could be tricky, uh, for some people and for some listeners, but a lot of the other tips that you had, you know, like spending more time around people, uh, avoiding apps on their phone, you know, the social media apps on their phone or news apps on their phone, going to the library, reading books. These are all things that everyone else can do. And so in a related topic, you previously said that the, this is a quote from you. The majority. It's like having a fight with your partner. They're like, you said, did I what? You signed off on this statement. You said that the majority of people on this planet are not involved in cryptocurrency and they're not on Twitter.

43:22Jon Krohn:And yet we're hearing such a huge disproportionate amount about cryptocurrency and whoever's on Twitter providing their views. So as a broadcaster that communicates complex AI issues and real world priorities related to it, like climate change and the future of work, how do you counter sensationalist narratives, maybe in those personal conversations that you had, but also maybe on air? I mean, I've got a lot of very constructively critical friends who are not involved in tech at all who are like, you know, I'll be like, oh my God, this is happening with NVIDIA. And they're like so what like literally i don't care i'm like okay i'm gonna stop talking at this dinner party now they don't care and that's actually genuinely that's really helpful because i have to remember and i think anyone working day in day out in whatever field they're in we happen to be in technology but i'm sure that you know cardiologists have their own obsessive favorite topics too that no one else is aware of but for cardiologists a really big scandal or whatever um i don't know why i'm just picking cardiologists but you know it's also it's kind of funny that right now for a lot of cardiologists, it is probably Nvidia and machine vision algorithms and things like that.

44:33No, I was just thinking like, what is inside baseball, you know? So it's like journalists love to talk about it. Also, what's the easy story to get? So the companies are pumping out PR or it's just lots of money or whatever. But again, step out into the streets of your neighborhood and be like, hey, Nvidia is doing like 5 billion in Intel, 100 billion in open AI? What do you think about GPUs? And they're just like, I'm sorry, could you like literally just stop talking? And you're kind of like, ah, okay. If I walk down the street here in Hackney, is this relevant? And if you ask people, because then you can stop talking and be like, you're right.

45:11Please tell me, what would you like to know about technology? Which is a thing that I do a lot with people. What would you like us to put on the program? What would you like me to research for you? What is an important problem that you'd like to see solved? And is technology part of the solution or not? Because maybe it isn't. People are like, look, what subject should my kids be studying in school? And potentially if they were to go into university or some sort of post age 18 educational environment or work environment, what do they need to do to get a job? Full on. Second, I'm already working.

45:43I'm the parent or I'm 28 or whatever. And now people are telling me I have to either use AI or be exited, to quote Accenture, which is what these people have done in the English language. Use AI or lose your job. They're like, how do I do that? How do I reskill? How do I stay relevant? What should I be doing? What should I not be doing? If you're talking to companies, it's like, there's all this money going around with AI, but I need to know, where do I invest my money? I don't have an endless amount of money to invest. So where is the best return on investment for my organization, my sector? What's everybody doing?

46:15What are the risks, those things. That is where it gets helpful. And again, talking to doctors, how they're using AI versus talking to a designer, how they're using AI, AI is such a broad term. These people have, you know, it's that whole thing, where you stand depends upon where you stand. So depending on what you're doing in your life, you're going to have really different questions and concerns. So as a broadcaster, my job, which I'm sure I fail at daily, but I do try, is to hold all of that. And remember that when I'm on the radio, or if I'm on television, or if I'm interviewing, I'm trying to ask questions that I feel like the audience would want me to ask, if I'm lucky enough to have a guest, or to have been invited into to report.

47:00What would, what would everybody be like, yes, yes, she's asked that question. Or, oh, that's a really good question. I hadn't thought of it, but that's quite useful. And then they might, they might be able to go in, you know, actionable insights, tell it to someone in their lives. And it's helpful getting into some of the inside baseball stuff that can be really fun. If you're having a wonky conversation is less useful for most people and everybody has to decide where they are. There's a, there's a role for inside baseball. Absolutely. And I say this, I love baseball. The kind of work I'm trying to do is talking to the widest number of people around the world, sharing findings.

47:37and I ultimately would like this to be informative, actionable insights, possibly entertaining, but I'd rather it be more informative than entertaining.

47:50Jon Krohn:I mean, I think you're accomplishing that in everything that I've seen that you've done. I know. We'll find out as you get zero viewers for this or listeners for this. It's hard. Getting out of the way is also quite a good tip. I will often ask people if I'm interviewing them, what is a question that you would love or do you have any questions that you'd like for me to ask you because you can go in as an interviewer thinking i'm i've swatted up on this person i've studied the area i've got my questions and you have no idea where that person is on that day or what they've been working on that they haven't gone public with yet what's on their mind and also how few people will ever actually just ask them so if you ask them then they're like actually i want to tell you this or this i'm worried about this or i just came from this meeting and i'm i'm just thinking it through you can get some of your best your best broadcasting moments can be if you invite somebody to just go what's on your mind and give them the space and that means you have to zip the lip which i shall now do that's a really great idea i should probably just ask that kind of question more to start the podcast with what's on your mind yeah i like that what's something that you would like people to ask you that people never ask you uh some of the some people have like fascinating answers to that question and you're like oh my god like they just not feel heard do you have something a question that you wish i minus minus just i just need more sleep uh no because i'm not i'm not in the mode at the moment of like i don't have a product i'm selling first of all there's nothing i'm flogging where i'm like actually yes i'd like to tell you about my podcast and my sub stack i don't have these things um and i'm also right now working on a bunch of stuff that is not about technology so i don't be really relevant to this audience.

49:37But yeah, I mean, maybe that actually would be a thing. It's like, how does a researcher stay fresh and creative? Because you are constantly having to digest everybody else's stuff. There's a risk that you just become an aggregator and an amplifier of other people's thinking. So to come up with your, if you want to truly contribute in an original way and when you do something like a PhD you have to you have to say it like this is where the body of knowledge is and this is the gap that I have identified that is missing that I'm going to now work on and I shall attempt to fill the gap and that's you think you're blessed with the powers that be they give you some funding and off you go and you come back four and a half years later exhausted with forehead wrinkles and they're like okay have you filled the gap or not and that is your thesis and you defend it stamp at the end or not your job done, good luck, or go back and revise.

50:36That should, I hope, be where a researcher is approaching this from, which is, you know, how am I advancing knowledge? I don't know how you do that if you're just busy aggregating everybody else's knowledge all the time. So that's, you know, on the one hand, you're doing a permanent literature review, if you will. You're constantly having to be aware of everybody else's thoughts. But for you to be like, right, I have finished a bunch of research. I now have a clean runway. Where is, what is, what is not being looked at? And I'm looking over here at a blank wall right now. I'm like, what is not being looked at?

51:10And over there is my bookshelf. I'm like, that's all being looked at. There's this whole space here. What are the areas that I think are underserved and that would be useful? Am I the person to do it? Do I have the skillset to do it? Who would I have to work with to do it? You know, then you get into the house and stuff. And that I try to, I try to play in that space. It's very hard for me as a researcher because you're often very lonely or like, I'm going to go work on the thing that I don't think other people are working on. You know, it's like you and two other people that you find on the planet who are interested in it.

51:43And then eventually everybody, you know, by the time you've done your job, right. And you get there before everybody else does. And you're like, well, look at this diamond and everybody piles in. But by the time everybody wants to pile in, I'm gone. I'm long gone because I'm onto the next underserved thing. I hope that's the, that's the goal. That's not mean I achieve it, but that's at least the spirit with which I attempt to wake up every day.

52:04Jon Krohn:I'm glad you proposed this, uh, this meta question of what question should I ask? You had a great one and a great answer. Certainly something that I struggle with a lot myself as you know, we do 104 episodes a year of this show. and so a lot of it is it is just aggregation and letting other people have the floor and so this idea of you know what is my what is my contribution i would actually push back on that and say you're not just aggregating absolutely not you're part of a conversation like you just pulled something out of me that i haven't thought of before i was like what would i like to be asked you know like you've created a space and you've you prompt questions and you're doing that you 104 episodes a year, that's huge.

52:47You will have created things, I guarantee, that are original and new for both you and your guests. And then your sum, just your own output will have its own sum that will be unique. So there's a rule for that. And we see that in research all the time. There's like, are you interpreting and offering new interpretation? Or are you also going out and being like, look, I found a new element for the periodic table, right? There's room for both. And we are not all able to go or just even wanting to go. That's not why we are motivated to go and find that new periodic table element. Some of us, it's like, I'm actually going to do a new interpretation of the works of Shakespeare and you know, everything in between.

53:27So I think what you're doing is, is way more than aggregating for what it's worth.

53:30Jon Krohn:All right. Well, thank you, Dr. Hare. So I promised early one of your first, in one of the first minutes of this episode, we got talking about climate change in some way or other. Oh, because we were talking about weather in the UK. So it was very beginning of the show. And I promised that later in the show, we would get to some climate change related content. And so here it comes. Earlier this year, you were featured in an article called, this is a funny title to this article. I don't really understand it. It's something because it's to do with imaging informatics. So the title of this article is radiology responds to launch of UK AI action plan.

54:11Jon Krohn:I'm in this? Yeah. In it, you learn that the UK's energy grid is not fit for purpose to support the government's ambitious AI action plan. So how can policymakers get the right balance between the excitement of AI growth and the very real infrastructural limits of energy and sustainability? I mean, first of all, I really want to see this article because I'm very worried about this. It is true, though. I mean, the UK electricity grid is not fit for purpose. And that's the whole thing is we have a prime minister who announced at the beginning of this year that we were going to mainline AI into the veins of the nation.

54:50Which isn't a very British way of phrasing that, by the way. So I feel whoever phrased that came from North America and or had recently visited and was feeling really pepped up. And it sort of left everybody going, what? But now we've just had the US-UK tech deal announcement when President Trump came over, accompanied by an entourage of US tech leaders, and they announced a lot of money that was being invested in the UK. Largely, it must be said, for AI infrastructure, which we do need. Everybody needs. There's a country on earth that has enough AI infrastructure, and let's just keep it simple to data centers for now, to do what they want to do, which is why President Trump and entourage also went to the Middle East earlier this year.

55:37I happened to be there weirdly at the same time. So it was quite interesting to see what was going on and the energy effects that that had in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, because they need more. Everything's just more, more, more in this field. So that's fine. We want that. But then we have to get down to the infrastructure supporting the infrastructure. AI infrastructure, data centers in this case, sits on top of our existing infrastructure. So let me speak of my lovely adopted home here in the North Atlantic, the UK, which has the highest electricity prices in Europe, as we all know, living here, watching our bills go up every year.

56:22What is it going to mean to stress that grid with some big energy guzzling data centers and the amount? It's great to say we're going to build them, but how? Now we have to start getting dirty, literally dirty. We're going to dig it up. Where's it going to happen? How are we going to plug it in? Are we going to have rolling blackouts? What's the plan? Is it oil and gas powered? Is it nuclear powered? Is it renewables powered? right so like what's happening there then there's the fact um if you live in the uk you will know that we've been having ever increasing heat waves and i have mentioned we had like i think a record four this summer and it was actually quite scary i mean you really see the effects in nature here but what that also means is you know temperatures are rising and we're not getting enough rain something i believe that's happening in the u.s as well where i think 48 out of 50 states were in drought.

57:13So you've got a technology that is heavily water intensive, heavily energy intensive. Here in this country, you have a grid that is not fit for purpose. It's very old. Massive, massive investment will be required to get all of this fit for purpose in a country where we are seeing the government currently having its party conference saying they're going to have to break one of their promises not to raise taxes because we're broke. And the bond markets are punishing us. not a phenomenon that is unique to the UK. I was just in France recently, and they're having their own problems with this. I was in Germany just yesterday, zero growth for years now.

57:51This is the science and technology powerhouse of the continent, the biggest economy in Europe, zero growth. Where's that going? No plans, by the way, for infrastructure investment for AI in Germany. So one to watch. France wants to with nuclear, but can it? So you're looking around I'm going, it's all very well and good for the CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, to show up here and make his statements. And it's great. It's super exciting. And it nails all the headlines. But then you're like, how, sorry, where? Are you putting that all in the Southeast of England, where the majority of the population in this country lives?

58:29Have you seen what it's like to try and get anything built here? Good luck. We can't even build houses. We've got a housing shortage. Right. So I'm not trying to, this isn't like a negativity thing. It's like a dream is going to meet reality and there's going to be a moment. Uh, I'm here for it as a researcher, as a citizen, I'm curious as to how we're going to square that circle. And again, the promises have been made, diarized for five to 10 years to see how many of these things actually get built with a terrible record for huge infrastructure projects here. Um, I am very curious to see how that's going to work out in the Middle East for different reasons.

59:09You know, putting the world's biggest data center within reach of missiles from Iran is a very interesting move, right, politically. So we can talk about that. Like we haven't even mentioned the national security dimensions of this. I'm just talking here in the UK of like, can we actually just do it? And then how does this work for electricity and water? you want to put it into the middle east you are going to have an entirely different problem so that you then go who is positioned to do this who's been really good at infrastructure projects who's got the vision who's got the political will who's already looking at emerging technologies

59:49Jon Krohn:green tech leadership in this i think i know this one i don't know i mean i feel like i don't want to answer it i'm you know back to you well i know i would put down if we were in a pub quiz a book i'm currently reading a novel i'm currently reading is the three body problem am i going in the right direction yeah you know look may you live in interesting times is a curse for a reason but we will get to see it play out um we will get to see it play out and it's it's fascinating i was intrigued by Emmanuel Macron back in February in Paris at the AI summit when he was like, the United States says, drill, baby, drill, and they've got their nuclear fleet, which France is very proud, saying, plug, baby, plug.

1:00:37We've got all this electricity. And France and Macron in particular, although he will not be in power for much longer because of his term running out, not for any dramatic reason. France has its nuclear electricity solution. Can it decide to think bigger and make that part of a European solution? If Europe could work together, is that an option? Does the UK get some action despite Brexit on that? Again, when there's a will, there's a way. The engineering problem is the easy part in some ways of this. The human political social problem is the far bigger one. And we return thus full circle to my book, which is like wicked problems, right?

1:01:20That wonderful concept that so many of us, when you learn it, you're like, ah, finally a term for this thing I've been seeing my entire life.

1:01:26Jon Krohn:And I just didn't know the word for it. Multiple causes the problem and every solution that you pose creates yet more problems. This is where we're at right now. This has been a fascinating part of the conversation. And so it pains me that we're actually getting to a point where we're starting to wrap up. But my final technical question for you here, I think follows on nicely from the last topic that we just discussed. Your expertise, the stuff that you've been talking about broadcasting. Oh, by the way, I looked up into more detail that article that we had your last quote from that started with radiology.

1:02:02Jon Krohn:What was it? It was Radiology Response to Launch of UK AI Action Plan. you were not interviewed for that article which was on a relatively minor blog uh they pulled something that you had said on bbc news that's totally fair by the way if they wanted to use it we love radiologists i was just like i don't remember talking to this publication are we having invented quotes because like that's happening now right for sure it is gen ai does definitely invent quotes and i started to get a little little nervous as i started doing it but You did seem to recognize the quote as I got to it, but we should have.

1:02:37Jon Krohn:It would have been better for us to say that you said on BBC News, not in this random blog. So as you've discussed on BBC News, your expertise spans not just AI, but also other frontier technologies like the metaverse, cybersecurity. If you had to prioritize one of these as the most urgent frontier shaping human futures over the next decade, which do you think it would be? If I were only allowed to work on one, but it could be the one that I most want to work on and that I would feel most proud if I could contribute anything to be on climate crisis and biodiversity loss, by which I mean fixing them, not contributing to them.

1:03:21Yeah, I'm very worried about that. I'm very worried about that. I wish we were talking more about that. Not on this podcast. I mean, in our society and because we have so many other problems at the moment, I think it's not getting enough attention.

1:03:40But, you know, if you are even remotely interested in nature and plants and animals in the world around you, you cannot help but notice these changes. And science is being so politicized and defunded, which I really hate. I want to see this be the number one priority. It affects everything. AI could be part of this, by the way, but right now I don't think it is, but it could be. So I'm sort of adjacent to that. But yeah, I would want, I would like to see us be far more respectful members of this planet as a species than we've been.

1:04:20Jon Krohn:It is probably marginally more important than having even larger Gen AI capabilities, manufacturing porn flowing around the internet. maybe marginally more important than that. Yeah. No, it's absolutely. I think you're spot on there. I wasn't sure what you were going to say. But I think it makes a lot of sense that that would be a top priority for you. And it's not the most fun note to end this on. So well. It could be though, if you were like, what would that look like? Right. What would it look like if we actually backed research and science and cared about the environment, cared about, you know, if we parsed every single problem through that lens, wouldn't that just be awesome?

1:05:10I want to feel happy too, right? Like, let's end this on a high. Like, what would that look like?

1:05:15Jon Krohn:And I like, I think it's kind of fun to think about the idea of literally what the solutions would look like as well. You know, if you had, if you're driving on the highway and there's lots of, you know, crossings over the highway for animals to go over and you know there's lots of ways that it's actually it's visually pleasing and just enjoyable to think about if we had you know uh when you fly into newark airport as a lot of people do when they fly internationally into new york uh newark the journey from newark new jersey to new york city is just this awful industrial wasteland and marshland and you know you think And then traveling in some other countries like Switzerland and Germany, you see there's so much more nature and biodiversity.

1:06:06Jon Krohn:And so maybe that's kind of a fun way to visualize how things could be. I know. I was just in Switzerland in August for my summer holiday. And you're just like, my God, once you see this and then you come back to where you live, you're just like, there's another way, people. There's another way. I was taking videos and sending it to family and friends all over the world being like, and I know, you know, for apologies to the Swiss, they've been like, we know, but it is incredible. And there are countries that are working on this. And there are so many, this is what kills me. So many people care about this.

1:06:42You know, this is one of these areas where I'm like, this is not being served. This is an underserved area, both commercially, but also just as a human being, I do not know a single person who wants to breathe dirty air, right? Or who would, who would love to look at an industrial wasteland instead of a garden or a park or whatever. Who's like, oh yeah, we're killing plants and animals at a horrific rate. I'm fine with that. Like, no. And children, again, children are born understanding that they're part of something bigger than themselves and they're curious about it and they love it. And it's just like, what the hell happens to people that we just don't care by the end?

1:07:19So So, you know, luckily there's a bunch of good people who do care and I think supporting them is going to be a big part of it and keeping it front and center. So I do try to do that in my work. It's one of the areas that I'm, I'm going to be, I hope more focused on in the future. I wasn't always in the past. So this has been something I've also had to understand. My book barely mentions it at all, just to, you know, be like, what the hell? But again, I was running in a pandemic, but still, it still blows my mind when I go back and look at it. And I'm like, this is massive, unspoken thing. It just wasn't on our minds.

1:07:55So fair enough. Like there's no judgment here. I don't want to nail anybody if they're, if they're not thinking about it yet. I'm just saying for myself personally, I see it. I'm old enough now to see the changes, to have lived the changes. And I've traveled enough now to look and see how other people are doing things. And I'm like, it's not even like we have to come up with the better solutions. They exist. People pioneered them. We just have to do it. So maybe that's part of it as well, is sharing what other people have done that works and makes your life better. Why would you not want to live a better life?

1:08:27Jon Krohn:Love that. Great, great soundbite. So quickly before I let you go, do you have a book recommendation for us, Dr. Hare? Sometimes as a technologist, you get too much tech and you need to read something else. What I read last Christmas This was Richard J. Evans, Third Reich trilogy, which I shall demonstrate here. And the one that I think that I would like my fellow Americans to read right now is The Coming of the Third Reich, because it's actually quite useful and relevant for today. So I hope that's a political statement without saying why. But it goes into then what happens when the Third Reich got into power and then what happens when it went to war.

1:09:06And first of all, I just think it's useful because people constantly reference Nazis online without actually knowing their Second World War history other than from films. It's fine. We all like the films. But Professor Richard J. Evans has done God's work in actually slogging through the archives, reading all the literature and writing it in a way that if you read nothing else on World War II, read this book. But while you read it, you will probably mark it up as I did with, my God, this is happening now. my God, I did not realize that the first people that were rounding up in Germany were in fact Germans.

1:09:39Interesting, right? Like quite useful. So yeah, I would say sometimes put down the book about AI for a moment and pick up frankly, any book, but I really can recommend these. They are superbly written by one of the United Kingdom's top living historians.

1:09:57Jon Krohn:Great recommendation. Thank you. And I think, I think actually probably most of the book recommendations we get on this show are unrelated to our field. Yeah. Uh, so thank you for that. What would you recommend to me before I let you go, John? What book should I read? Goodness that puts me on the spot. Um, my, I mean this is kind of an AI book in a way, but it's a fiction book. It's, uh, Kurt Vonnegut from the 1950s. His first novel was called player piano piano. Yeah. And it's, uh, you know, Kurt Vonnegut is dark, but funny. And it is pretty stunning how he nails the moment that we're in today with Gen AI in his book from the 1950s.

1:10:39See, I would never have even known about this. I'm so grateful for you to have told me that.

1:10:44Jon Krohn:I will read it. There you go. Rendezvous in a couple months, we'll have book club. Sounds good. And then, yeah, final thing for you, Stephanie, is after this episode, other than catching you on BBC News, where should people be following you online? In a library? You should be reading Professor Evans's books rather than following me online. He has far more to tell you than I ever could. I am on LinkedIn if you feel the need to be aware of things I might be randomly posting on LinkedIn, which is mainly job adverts that other people are because I feel like all of us should always be aware of what's going on in the job market.

1:11:24So if I see something that's useful for other people, I will post it. I'm experimenting with Blue Sky, but I might not be on it for much longer just because I wanted a sort of Twitter alternative, but I just don't know. So yeah, I'm not a good person to follow on LinkedIn or sorry, on social media. No, I would just say, you know, follow me by reading books that you would enjoy. Like let's create that climate together and hit me up if you think if there's any good books I should be reading.

1:11:52Jon Krohn:I love that. Thank you so much. This has been a great episode. So much fun. So interesting. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you, Dr. Hare. Yeah. Nice one. In today's episode, Dr. Stephanie Hare covered how technology ethics can be defined as the practice of maximizing the benefits and minimizing the harms of any tool we build or use. Why a Hippocratic Oath for technologists could serve as a guiding ethos focusing on regulating harmful use cases rather than the tools themselves to avoid stifling innovation. She talked about how the rise of low-quality AI-generated slop may be the final stage in the internet's degradation, potentially forcing a return to more intentional real-world interactions.

1:12:35Jon Krohn:And she talked about why ambitious national AI strategies are on a collision course with the real-world infrastructural limits of aging energy grids and the immense energy and water demands of data centers. As always, you can get all the show notes, including the transcript for this episode, the video recording, any materials mentioned on the show, the URLs for Stephanie's social media profiles, as well as my own at superdatascience.com slash 935. Thanks to everyone on the Super Data Science Podcast team, our podcast manager Sonja Breivich, media editor Mario Pombo, partnerships manager Natalie Zajski, researcher Serge Macis, writer Dr.

1:13:11Jon Krohn:Zara Karche, and our founder Kirill Arimenko. Thanks to them for producing another stellar episode for us today, for enabling that super team to create this free podcast for you. We are deeply grateful to our sponsors. You, listener, can support this show by checking out our sponsors' links, which you can find in the show notes. And if you'd ever like to sponsor the show yourself, you can make your way to johnkrone.com slash podcast to find out how you can do that. Otherwise, help us out by sharing this episode with people who would like to hear it or view it. Review this episode on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube.

1:13:47Jon Krohn:Subscribe, obviously, but most importantly, just keep on tuning in. I'm so grateful to have you listening, and I hope I can continue to make episodes you love for years and years to come. Until next time, keep on rocking it out there, and I'm looking forward to enjoying another round of the super data science podcast with you very soon.