Hello, and welcome to today’s edition of the Future in Five Questions. Steven interviewed Josh Parker, the senior director of corporate sustainability at Nvidia, the artificial intelligence juggernaut and third-largest company in the U.S. Parker argues that AI and accelerated computing offer a path to solving the climate crisis. Though climate researchers have shown AI consumes vast stores of energy, Parker says the technology is a tool for sustainability. You can hear more from Parker on today’s episode of the POLITICO Tech podcast. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. What’s one underrated big idea? Generative AI as a tool for economic development in the developing world is a big idea that is underrated so far. It's really easy to focus on how large companies and developed economies are likely to use and benefit from AI, and the potential there is hard to overstate because it's transformative and definitely worth our attention. But I've seen people start to also connect the dots about the potential for generative AI to democratize highly individualized and effective education, and to remove barriers to development. We should be rushing to find ways to deploy this technology, especially in areas where it can have the greatest positive impact on people's lives. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? Well, not so much a technology, but a concept. There's been a lot of concern and focus on sentient AI or artificial general intelligence, and perhaps not enough focus on what AI is doing for us right now. And it's understandable. AI can be scary, especially when people have read all of the science fiction stories and so forth. But what AI is right now is useful, and it's interesting and it's wonderful. It's helping us do more than we ever have before and it's going to help us solve some really hard problems. So I think focusing on practical AI and what we have at our fingertips is really beneficial. What book most shaped your conception of the future? So, I'm going to cheat and choose two. The first one is The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and then the second one is Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. The Black Swan helps us contextualize in the global age we live in how one event can potentially change the entire narrative of the world. And I think we're living through a period right now with the advent of generative AI where a black swan event is happening all around us and where this event is going to be potentially the defining event for generations to come. And then Co-Intelligence is a really pragmatic, highly readable book about AI and its near-term utility. Even though we're still in the early stages of the AI revolution, there's so much productivity we can capture if we start taking advantage of what's available right now. If you go back to ChatGPT in just one month, it may have dramatically improved in capabilities that you haven't seen before. So it's really encouraging me to make sure that I'm checking very regularly what you can do with this technology. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Accelerating every workload is probably the best thing that the government could be doing. And then once you have this accelerated computing platform, using it to implement AI in ways that serve the public good can again be very transformative in a positive way for constituents of policymakers and for the country as a whole We actively work with the federal government on several projects. One example is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They're using accelerated computing, our platform, to model proteins to help with drug discovery. So, the national labs are, of course, leading here. They're finding practical ways to use it for energy development and modernization of the grid and for mitigation with natural disasters. But there's a lot of opportunity to expand that throughout the government, and I think the policymakers and members of Congress are actively trying to do that. What surprised you most this year? A lot of the narrative about AI's energy consumption has actually been surprising and disappointing to me. I'm surprised that the conversation has been one of so much concern rather than one of a mixture of, okay, we've got a near-term problem to solve, but medium-term, long-term, this is fantastic. This is the best tool that we've had for sustainability. Let's find a way to make it work. And, ultimately, it's going to help us reduce our energy dependence and, at the same time, modernize the grid and save lives and discover drugs and so forth.
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