RealmIQ: SESSIONS with Laura Edwards

Season 2 of Realm IQ Sessions launches with a focus on AI and its intersection with key global issues. Host Curt Doty introduces Laura Edwards, a NASA Datanaut and member of the Oxford Space Initiative, who discusses the critical role of data and AI in addressing climate change, governance, and innovation in near space. Edwards emphasizes the importance of smarter, dynamic systems for tackling global challenges and highlights the interconnectedness of AI, climate, space, and governance. The episode also touches on the evolving potential of AI to improve storytelling, enhance accessibility to data, and serve as legal guardians for nature. The podcast includes promotional segments for Ovations, a speaker booking platform, and sponsorship opportunities for organizations targeting AI professionals.

Topics:

1. Launch of Realm IQ Sessions Season 2.
2. Role of data and AI in addressing climate change.
3. Interconnection of climate, AI, and space governance.
4. The concept of data sovereignty and accessibility.
5. AI’s evolving potential in storytelling and advocacy.
6. The challenges of environmental impacts from AI computing.
7. Space as a tool for Earth observation and connectivity.
8. Laura Edwards' career trajectory and insights from NASA and Oxford.
9. Opportunities in AI for dynamic systems and governance.
10. Sponsorships and promotional partnerships for AI-related platforms.

Pull Quotes with Sources:

1. "Data is not the same as information, but data can lead to information and knowledge." - Laura Edwards
2. "We need smarter, faster tools to approach the systems challenge of climate change." - Laura Edwards
3. "AI never sleeps. It can spot, adjust, and work with humans to solve big problems dynamically." - Laura Edwards
4. "Space is not just about exploration; it’s the infrastructure enabling modern connectivity and observation." - Laura Edwards
5. "Governance and ethics must evolve alongside AI and space innovation." - Laura Edwards
6. "Climate is the biggest geopolitical crisis, with drought driving instability and migration." - Curt Doty
7. "Digital twins and synthetic media have the potential for profound positive impacts on research and storytelling." - Curt Doty
8. "The explosion of AI computing demands solutions to its environmental impact." - Laura Edwards
9. "Commerce and private sector funding are critical drivers of change in solving global issues." - Curt Doty
10. "We need a search engine for data archives to democratize access to human knowledge." - Laura Edwards

Transcript

So Season 2 is here, and I'm kind of excited about the lineup.  Realm IQ Sessions started last year. We have almost 25 interviews with various experts from all over the world.  And we're having conversations about AI, which,  if you don't know, is top of mind, top of the news. And it can, could, and will affect everyone.

So, listen in.  But first, listen up.  Are you a speaker trying to get gigs? Are you a booker trying to get your speakers on panels and events or give keynote addresses?  Then you need to look into the one stop platform that does this for you. Ovations, with a Z. It's the first online platform to simplify the talent finding and booking process for virtual events. 

Go to www. ovations. com, and again, that's with a Z. And there you can find a variety of speakers, including myself.  And if you're a booker, use the promo code. Curt5, that's C U R T number five,  and get a 5 percent discount for booking any speaker, including yours truly.  If your company is interested in reaching an audience of AI professionals and decision makers to promote your event or product, we have sponsorship opportunities on this podcast.

Go to realmiq slash sponsors.  Okay, let's talk about our next guest, Laura Edwards. The session was fascinating as it Connect the dots between data, near space, climate change, and AI. Something we haven't really covered.  I first met Laura when she used to produce shoots for me almost 25 years ago.  And we worked together across three different agencies and even at Universal. 

Then she pivoted, as she will tell you all about it.  So, let's listen in.  Hello, I'm Curt Doty with Realm Q. This is our podcast, Realm IQ Sessions, where we talk about everything AI with AI leaders from around the world. Please give us a follow or subscribe. Today's guest is Laura Edwards. Laura is an innovation catalyst who advises on opportunities where the climate and space sectors have the most powerful synergies.

She's a NASA Datanaut. And member of the Oxford space initiative  and served on the state department's technology innovation subcommittee for public and private partnerships.  Welcome Laura. That was a mouthful. Let's get into it. You have such an interesting career. Tell us a little bit more about how you got to where you are.

Cause we go back,  I don't know, almost 30 years. Almost. I was going to say, we didn't have to wear reading glasses back when, back when we met.  How did I get here? I got here because of a lifelong interest in environmentalism, particularly conservation that gradually became more and more of a focus on climate and sort of stepped away.

I started my career in commercial solar and.  Very sharp left turn into media and media technology where where you and I met and worked together for so many years as I as that part of my life was shifting back. I came back to my first love of what to do with what could I uniquely do to be a small change agent in the in the bigger context of what the world needed in terms of environmental action that led me to reenter the world of green tech green energy.

And quickly saw the, the, the tragedy of the open data comments that there was all this amazing data being gathered, but it wasn't very available. It's not even searchable. People, you know, I did a Ted talk on the fact that there's no search engine for data, even though people think there is that, that is what brought me to always looking at what are the platforms and tools and trends.

To approach systems challenges and climate, as, as I'll talk about it a little more, is that, you know, the profound front and center systems challenge of our day.  It certainly is. And we're not doing a very good job. Is there hope for us? And how does, how does data help in the fight against climate change?

I guess is the question.  Well, data,  information is power and data is not the same as information, but data can lead to information and knowledge and insights and part of why we, in my opinion, why we haven't made the impact that we should have, you know, beyond politics and corruption and, and, and lack of funding, all viable contenders for, for top irritants.

There's the, the, the challenge of the fact that by the time you look at something. And then have debate about it and get funding and momentum. It's changed.  Previously had very good and we still don't have excellent tools for the anything close to dynamic systems studies. And so that's one of the, of the, to me, the most intriguing things that can happen from the advances in AI to, to be able to do that, to be able to keep up, to think as fast as not quite as real life, but close.

So, so smarter data that can.  Aid versus hinder progress. Is that the summary? Is that how you see AI working into it? I mean, AI has been around a while. Gen AI is what has been the sensation over the last year, but automation and, you know, data management, data mining, algorithms, all that has been around for a while.

So how are the new developments? AI assisting you, or what's your vision for, for the new AI that's happening?  Well, it it, I think it's important to, as you said, ai, AI as a, as a field of computing has been around quite a while, but so has big data and big data management, and even big computing, right? So there's, there are a whole bunch of things that I think get conflated into, oh, now AI is the term when we are really talking about big data.

and because there's a ton of really valuable things in the climate and climate data toolbox that have not, that are not AI,  that are simply very big data and, and, and  impressive database management in relational databases, et cetera. And so  what, what is new about AI is the potential for, or we're watching it both.

At massive scale of, of, of computation and of tracking and of the ability to learn as it goes.  Big data and regular databases don't learn. AI has the potential to learn. So that allows us, that's where the generative AI comes in too. But the, it's, it's not about it being an Oracle. It's about it spotting things, adjusting, working with humans and other programs.

We're starting to see layered models of models. And then just think about how deep and dark that goes, right? So there's real potential for on the fly. That's why you're seeing such a huge investment in AI as a situational awareness tool, right? Mostly funded by various militaries and security apparatuses.

But that technology, that speed will filter into. The public sector and private sector and therefore into the public sector faster and faster. So that's really exciting because we, to your question of how does having more data affect, we've been stymied by the bottleneck in the in the climate and environmental sector of both corruption on the ground and just sheer logistics and costs of putting sensors. 

Satellite data, and then that being available to all kinds of folks, monitoring both species and habitat change and, and, and bad actors has the ability to do that without the cost. Satellite data is still not cheap. Even if you get some things for free, right. Analyzing is still a lot of work and, and, and big compute, but compared to trying to have on the ground and monitor all over the world, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of sensors.

It's a lot cheaper. It's a lot more doable. It's a lot less prone to corruption.  So that's, that's a, that's a big data. And then a unique thing that AI can do, which is pick and choose and learn and adjust to all these very.  So, yeah, you know, a lot of these BTs are based on  LLMs and debate is, you know, what consists of your LLM and how is.

Your GPT being trained. Is it on the general internet? Is it based on the New York Times? You know, what's legal? What's, you know, what's legal and what's not legal? And, and also what's ethical and to your concern,  what's available, right? Because you can, you can, I imagine you could build a GPT available.  In the GPT store and somehow, somehow  if one can access some data that  you could build some type of tracking or synthesize data to to do something because there has to be some public data, even if it's not enough.

But there must be something, so, I mean, is that within the realm of possibilities?  Well, one of the things that AI is immediately a real opportunity in is identifying the gaps in data. Right? The same way when we see those images of Earth, kind of like my background here, where whole parts of the world are dark.

Because of power or broadband or whatever the metric is, we should have a virtual emerging data map and see where whole parts of the world are dark and how completely not okay that is. An analogy would be genomes, right? We have a lot of genome research, but it's from very small, tends to be Western, tends to be Northern Hemisphere, pockets of the world.

That does not provide the models that we need for public health, for example. Right?  And same with same with climate. So there's the just just it's the ability to move quickly at scale. And I would say that some some bright signs are the fact that for the last 20 years, environmental scientists have really become sophisticated data scientists.

They have to work with these things. So they're already ready. Right there, they don't need to be retrained and more and more parts of the world are getting involved in things like satellite data, whether it be, you know, coming, coming down or then more likely the analytics of it once you're on the ground and developing their own data science.

Cohort and capacity within their own regions and countries and cultures. So there's a lot of interest in a particularly southern hemisphere of having data sovereignty around things about their terrestrial environment on a granular that they can use both for negotiating and power and they can use it for many things.

But the net net of that is more data filling in some of these dark spots. It's just good for better models for where are we as a planet going to put our investments into mitigating climate or climate change. You, you mentioned data sovereignty, sovereignty if they are starting to get it, certain countries, let's say,  will they want to give it up?

Are there  governmental privacy concerns around sharing data is we're very, we're in a fractured, fractured world. Not everything is. Open and kumbaya, as you know so well, and I mean, it's also, let's, let's be really clear. We're now in an, in a, in an era where there's too much data, there's not enough for the right data, there's not enough tools for dealing with dynamic data, okay?

But number one issue in, in, for example, satellite data, is that  too much is coming down. It's too exhausting when you only need a few pieces. So what can be done? A lot of really interesting things are being done about how can we pre select or pre compute on the satellites before sending it down, which is both slow and expensive.

You know, for many reasons to speed it up for monitoring things like wildfires, but also just to make it more useful, I'm only sending you what you need, right? There's a reason you have team meetings. You want somebody to have sifted through and to tell you what you really care about. And the Parsing.

Parsing the data. Right?  Exactly right. And summarizing. There's not only  parsing it, but then summarizing it into  digestible reports that are meaningful to whoever wants the data, right?  Well, I mean, again, how do we use data? We use, we use data in real time to, to, you know, now we don't even think about GPS and how, what it's actually doing and how it got there, but it's not useful to me to know what the delay was three days ago. 

Three days ago. Data is super interesting for a different kind of study for long, not at all useful to me. Yeah, those are data they need to be stored and dealt with somewhere. How much information do I need to make to do whatever it is I need to do? And the same as in the environmental sector.  for climate is some things we need to know right now.

Forest fires, flooding, you know, dumping, terrible, terrible things over, you know, illegal fishing, etc. But many things we need, we need historical studies. And so question of data sovereignty and what will be released and what won't, well there's always going to be the component in data that is about national security or about the claim for national security.

So that is a,  I'm not as concerned about that in terms of climate data, maybe with some exceptions of.  Of solo mono industry countries that want to minimize their activity, but most stuff most stuff is known So i'm not too worried about that. Okay  Yeah, I mean it has been said that the climate crisis is the biggest geopolitical crisis Facing us, let alone facing the United States as we  have immigrants pouring in because of  various factors from their country that are driving them away, whether it's drought or crime or,  you know, drug lords or what have you.

So. You know, our, our defense department knows that the climate change is, is our biggest threat because, because of this shifting of  populations, right. From  desolate places to, you know, from Somalia to where do you go from Somalia across the Mediterranean to Italy or Greece, or is it to America through Mexico it's strange, straining all the systems of, of.

Immigration policies, right? Because it's just too much for us to deal with.  Well, there's a theory that civilizations at core are most commonly failed because of drought. And because drought makes all those other things happen. Yeah. And the drought might be because of an ice age, but it's still a drought.

And you know, because then you have food insecurity, and then you have instability, and then you have people on the move.  Never a good recipe for peace and prosperity. So again, our, I think it's really important to look at climate, which is so big and so overwhelming as a topic and put it into context of what I think are just as my personal thesis, that there are six primary, massive, existentially affecting humans and the planet areas of systems change over the next 30 years.

So there are others, but these are a big six that are deeply interconnected. So climate,  space,  biotech, geopolitics, right? We're at an inflection point on global geopolitics in terms of being able to harm ourselves irrevocably beyond nukes. It's not just nukes. What I would, what I call a universal connectivity, which is super exciting.

The idea of everybody having the tools and being able to communicate the dark side of that, of course, is universal surveillance. So that's a, that's an entire system.  That's right. And then the last one is AI quantum, right? Big computing with artificial intelligence. What does, what, and, and when we look at systems, we tend to do snapshots of single complex systems like climate.

We don't ever put it side by side and go, Oh,  what are the opportunities and challenges of these things that are all frankly happening at the same time?  I, I always describe it as like the double Dutch jump rope where you got it, you know, and so our tools need to catch up to what is the magic moment?

What is that? Where do you throw the dart to make the most high leverage  difference? And that's, that's, I think some of the super opportunity in thoughtful AI develop this next gen that is coming because a big boom, I believe really is coming as. As two to five years of investment and by the, by the big players, Silicon Valley defense and others, we're going to see a, just,  you know, we can't even imagine where it's going.

And so let's be ready for it. What, what is the tool you've always been waiting for? Well, ask for it. It can happen more quickly now. So those six systems that you described.  They're all, they're all connected as well. They're not individually isolated. And that's so interesting how you, you know, where do you throw the dart when, when they're all interconnected. 

And all had to be looked at and I, I've heard you talk about systems for a while and I find you just explained, you just explained it so eloquently. So thank you. And I have a much better understanding about your, your studies and your. Thesis. So, you know, you mentioned climate and space. I'm a skeptic around space exploration at this point in our lives when we really need to fix our own planet versus populate another.

But what are your thoughts or how do you see this connection between space and the need to still explore and how that helps us down here on earth?  So, I would, it's, it's, when it comes to space, it's really important to separate, again, you can see behind me, there's the, what looks like a light blue line, roughly reflecting the atmosphere curving around, and that's space.

That little band is space.  And just beyond it, and not much further beyond it, is where telecommunications has been operating for 80 years.  And that's space. I defy you. I mean, maybe there's a few folks who want to go off grid and to the farm and don't want any electricity or GPS. But that's, that's the actual space.

Okay. Right?  So, so most of the, of the brouhaha of like, Oh, we shouldn't be doing that. And we shouldn't be going is about next day, stage out Mars and beyond. And then way beyond deep space. Those are different, that's a different conversation. So, so in terms of, no, no, it's a, it's a very,  very eloquent explanation about  our tech that is in space tracking all these things that we depend on every day.

And that is space. And so the health of that little ribbon behind you is the air that we breathe, right?  The firmament and, and that's getting. Affected by carbon emissions in the entire cosmos, or even just in our single little tiny baby solar solar system, the most most satellites are in low Earth orbit, the International Space Station is 200 is roughly 250 miles up.

Okay,  is 12 times farther than that.  And Mars is orders of magnitude, much, much farther. Right. So when we're talking about space and, and the, because at some point you do, you know, you have that whiz.  We, as people, as citizens, have the right to be skeptical, and we should, about how our nations spend our money, spend our, risk our, our, our people's lives.

All those good things are fair, completely fair questions. But back to space isn't, first of all, space isn't ending. Telecommunications and low Earth orbit and the power of of, of super satellites that are in the, you know, the geostationary satellites that are considerably more expensive and farther out.

Those are also not going anywhere. There's no, if anything, there will be more so that there is greater visibility. Same way that folks in real life want their streaming content to, to issue with no glitches. We want our signal stronger, better, and observational data.  Better for whether it's tracking a forest or whether it's, you know, countries tracking things, other things that we don't want to know about.

So there's a lot of motivation for those things. So in terms of space and climate, there's a couple of things. The most obvious. And topical one, of course, is high resolution or timely Earth observation data, also called  geospatial data. But there's so much else that space does for climate, but that, that's a, that's not necessarily about AI.

So I'll save that for another conversation.  Okay. No, it's all fascinating stuff. And  as you mentioned, satellites and technology and people getting services here on Earth. How has 5G played into  You know, this whole  hyped up connectivity world that we're leaning, you know, leaning heavily into, you know, I'm not an expert to answer that, but I would say faster, better, cheaper across more parts of the earth  makes it that more folks can opt in.

It certainly means that a whole lot of citizen science or smartphone science. can be done both professionally and in science. So I think that's the, if that's just my gut reaction of that, it is  empowering some of that. Yeah. It seems like that's the  play. It's about bandwidth and having more access to data and  other places that you wouldn't normally.

Be able to get it, whether it's the desert or a baseball game. Right. It's like,  you know, I think that's the promise of 5g, but you know, we just haven't heard much about it since it launched a lot of conspiracy theories around it, but you know, hardly, hardly believable, but you know.  There's an opportunity in the GSMA, the, the, which is the trade association of mobile carriers around the world. 

It's some really interesting things, but think about it. They have a map. If you put the 250 or so mobile carriers globally, they, they're, they.  Nobody has any, nobody else has anywhere close to the reach of putting things in people's pockets to be able to coordinate data gathering. So that is not about AI necessarily, but it is about new modes for being intentional about gathering datasets that are essential for using the power of AI.

We can do new things.  If four billion people over a period of a week followed a set of prompts and use their smartphones for that,  that's a data set, right? Yeah, that, and that's a future statement. That's why I wanted to get to next was what's your, you know, one to three year, you know, wishlist of how AI can enable your research and your, your passion and what the net benefit is to.

The world, you know, not just you as a researcher, but to human civilization.  I think there's,  I'm, I'm very interested in tracking the efforts to.  Have AI as legal guardians or identities of parts of nature. So representing that giant, you know, migrating group of blue fin tuna and negotiating on their rights and tracking them and act thinking they are a blue fin or, or parts of, of the forest.

It starts to get very, very interesting when you think of legal guardianship. And, and it's easy to forget an AI is whatever you tell it it is. If you tell it it's a person, it thinks it's a person.  And if you tell it it's a dolphin, it's a dolphin or a tree.  That starts to get really, really interesting.

Okay, mind blown. There you go. But somebody's got to negotiate those contracts. And you think of the, of Santa Claus's, you know, toy shop. Well, it's sort of like, what are the cogs and wheels behind all the actual labor it takes? And so AI never sleeps. That, that, I'm excited to see that experimented with and refined and come up with proper frameworks.

There's been a lot of talk about working with indigenous communities as the, as the co parent, co guardians, some of these nature AI experiments, prototypes. I'm looking forward to seeing that. I, I, well, I also think, you know, my, my personal pet wish is an AI superhero reference librarian because. Data is siloed.

We need, we need massive data discoverability. So there's a, so there's the live data of which there's almost too much. And then there's, there's data, valuable data that, that the whole world, one level or another has spent a lot of time and money training people gathering and then archiving precious data.

It's, it's, it's, it's the data archives we would pull from if we needed to go off planet. Right. If we were going to send off an arc of what is the most important human data that we'd want if we needed to recreate or represent human achievement and civilization, and yet there's no search engine across those a I could fix that.

Yeah,  it has the has the ability to do that. So a simple application would be currently.  If you're going to do your Ph. D. or you're, you're a, you're somebody on an academic track where you're considering a Ph. D., you are, over time, you'll, you don't have any visibility on other than, than a, than a slow cadence of seeing academic peer review papers, you don't know who else is doing what.

So we have redundant and parallel work going on all over the world, which is a really bad use of some of our elite talent. Right, so just simple practical things like that. Yeah, wasn't that the promise of the internet to like unify the world in that way? And it's just crazy that it has yet to do that in terms of  scientific research.

The internet didn't start with search, it was a, it was a, a yellow pages for web pages. I mean, once it went from list servers and a, and a military application, it became basically a phone book. Well, the phone book is static. I can look at up the people through the W, but I still need to know their name to have a chance to find them.

It doesn't suggest anything. It doesn't cross pollinate. So  when I think of what I'm excited about, I'm also excited for the hype and the confusing jargon of the term digital twin. To become a useful model, right? That is. The, the, the whole set of human cognitive tools and the ability to, to think about these things and to prototype and run scenarios and experiments with, with dimension and, and, and it's almost like robotic surgery.

It's, it's, it's a remote and robotic surgery. Like it's so crazy, but. Where are you going to practice? How do you do it? How do you study things that you can't step inside? You can't step inside an atom, but a digital twin could put you inside the atom to move around and do stuff. And not as a animation explainer science has acted that, that, that when that becomes something real that people can interact with both on a, you know, daily life way, but as a research tool. 

Yeah. Well, digital twin to me means synthetic media.  We, we recently had a horrible case of synthetic media with the Taylor deepfakes, Taylor Swift deepfakes. So, you know, there's a lot of evil doers that are using this technology in the wrong way, but you just described how to use it in the right way. And I think that's fascinating.

And we need more examples and talk about how to use digital twins, synthetic media, these proxies, right? For ourselves to, A, to do something because They never sleep, right? You mentioned that so that, you know, if our digital twin is our better self, you know, what are these digital twins doing  for the positive? 

Another thing that pulls it all together and makes it accessible is, I mean, look what's happened in the, in the accessibility of graphics and templates and. Even people like me, who for sure don't code, can put up a website. I might, I might still swear a lot as I do it, but I can make one. And the, the,  one of the many things beyond, you know, the smartphone and accessible research tools that That less funded organizations and citizen scientists and students and folks can get involved in and will, it'll become faster, better, cheaper.

One of the ongoing needs that is, has gotten cheaper is storytelling.  So now I could, again, I'm a good litmus test because I am  spoiled by agency days and talent pools, but I don't have those hands on skills myself. So, but if I needed to, if I had to, I could go make a video.  And that, but one of the big issues in climate is that, is the need for variable audience short form last minute, but high production value because everything now people expect such high production value.

I think that one of the great things that unheralded  things that AI will make possible and generative AI as it gets more sophisticated and rights protected will allow the ability to make incredible short films.  For tomorrow, right? Like you and I, how much money did we, you know, budget and how many teams did we organize to make a five minute film for a client?

Well, I could make one for tomorrow that will, I'd be proud to show at the U. N. That, that  is going to be new. And climate needs. Climate overall has a big bummer, existential bummer story  of a lot of you shoulds and the sky is falling. Well, we need better, smarter, faster ways to target audience, make pieces, including pieces that tell the other, other parts of that story.

Like my personal favorite climate is a market opportunity, right?  As a tool for, for change. So I'm looking forward to AI and generative AI, particularly as the video side of it gets better  to be a, to, to be that little creative agency with me. To make absolutely. I think that type of empowering someone like you and me who come from, you know,  understanding all the expense of doing production, film production, film, post production, special effect, all that stuff, but using AI to. 

Increase storytelling, increase evangelism and increase awareness that is so much a part of the deterrent and adds to the confusion of  what are we supposed to be doing? And because no one understand it, the most simple politician, you know, will bring a snowball into Congress and throw it at, you know, a Democrat and say, Here's your global warming, you know, and it's like you really don't get it buddy.

So  Yeah, there's such a ignorance of so many people, but, and, and a lot of people just don't have access to information and not that they're trying to seek data, they're just trying to understand the real world implications, even though we're, we're seeing the, the, the effects.  Every day in the news and the weather and the politics and the  drought, you know,  but where's the story that  Explains it all just like you have done in this podcast, which I you know I I applaud you and it's so awesome that  you're doing this work it's it's important to note and shout out or whatever that the  AI much like crypto has the Gaping challenge of its own negative environmental impact anytime you have more data centers And when more, you know, hot computers, it is, it is not nothing.

It is not a, it is not a benign environmental impact in its own right. The back to space, one of the open questions. We put data centers under the water and here on earth, where we put them in  space for, you know, so essentially, but that is a legitimate on top of all the other concerns of, of, of AI and black boxes and, and rogue actors and fundamental code from the eighties, perhaps being outdated and biased and sexist there there's, there's the very real environmental issue of just.

The more we get big compute, not only do we have a, a rare earth metals challenge, we have, we have a a toxicity of data centers and computing. So those are, those are questions that have not been properly addressed as we get more and more excited about what they can do. And it's not going to stop. So we are, we don't want to, the only thing I've heard about is, you know, the evolution of the chips that we're using.

Which will help somewhat, but I think where you put those  servers in space or underwater, I think that's, you know, amazing. Right now, they're in the desert. They're in  Las Vegas, you know, in the Las Vegas desert. I mean,  it's crazy. That's right. Yeah.  So it's a global challenge and it, it, that, that is a, that is a big business opportunity.

You can figure out how to make the environmental impacts of AI  and the explosion of AI computing requirements, you know, have a, have a leveling off.  That will be that will be a huge contribution to to humanity and money to be made, right? I mean, it's like I think it's when commerce enters into the equation  That all of a sudden you have the private sector and the government sector funding  these problems that need to be solved and if companies can make money getting contracts either from the government or just Creating their own industry,  that's what's going to save us and make change.

But people don't  think about the commerce side. I don't think about there's a business here and it's going to save the world.  Right. So I, you know, I'll use one example. There were a number and full props, by the way, to the early days, no revenue anywhere in insight efforts by, you know, big players like Microsoft and Google.

Who really started, they were pre planet and pre all these cool new AI startups, really looking at Earth observation and AI and, and, and pairing those and running experiments. So models like there's really cool things that only AI can do, like taking uploaded photos of travelers all over the world. So just the international travelers are people in Africa on safari. 

Who take pictures of animals or people whale watching or things like that around the world. The AI  can go into that, to Facebook and Instagram, et cetera, TikTok, and can spot and match individual animals based on their market.  Things that, that, you know, biologists just dream, drool over, but who pays for that?

Who pays to develop it? Who pays to maintain it? That same kind of technology is probably being used by Interpol.  And  nobody minds when Interpol patches the smugglers, but you might right. So we need to be patient or or have some understanding that things need a business application or often need a business application to be able to underwrite.

The really cool, you know, let's save the cheetahs application that somebody, it still costs money to go run so called free programs and then get developed. So there's this cycle and, but the good news is it's all happening faster and faster in terms of migrating out into something. So companies like a Google might release those learnings.

And then some group of individuals or nonprofit can run with and dedicate their resources to exactly that. AI tracking of cheetahs. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. You know, there is a story behind capture as well. You know, the where you're getting people just to. Tag photos and identify things and photos, and that's being collected and is helping some larger initiative around data.

I'm not, I'm not sure what the play there is, but that it's a great example of this little consumer tool that's kind of harmless and people are doing every day. And somehow it's supporting a huge data set and informing. Someone about pictures and the objects in them. So there's gotta be a lot of learning and machine learning around that type of data, but it's a supports, you know, what you're describing is what, you know, what is the commercial application that makes it happen and who pays for it and what is the simple way to.

to get consumers to participate, you know, not even knowing they're participating, right?  There's plenty of that. People don't read the terms and service terms and conditions of the everything they're signing up for. We'll see if that gets better, but we'll listen. We're nearing the end of our time here, but I just wanted.

So as a last question, you know, you worked for NASA and Oxford, it's so interesting in academia and technology and space. So what are some quick stories about what you've been doing for those institutions? Oh, sure. Well, so as a NASA data not, which is a, was a great program that, that NASA actively ran to bring a higher access for people interested in data.

So I consider myself a data activist, not a data scientist. Other, most of my cohorts were at True Data Scientists with skills I don't have, but we were, we actively looked at how to use this treasure trove of, of existing and future gathered NASA data, right? And NASA is a unique institution on the world that has a public, a charter, a congressional charter that has to share information with the public, not everything, but as much as you can.

So they, that. So as a NASA Data Knot, we, we had access behind the scenes of how things are gathered and what our systems and, and ideated and, and prototyped ways to help NASA speed up that pipeline to the public of public data. But there is a massive amount of NASA data available, even though it's not as easy to find as it should be. 

It's a bone of contention. So it's more of an ongoing community and mission alignment, and I hope some administration in the future brings back that budget in the, in their, that line item in the, in the NASA budget. It was a profoundly, profoundly terrific program. The Oxford Space Initiative is really about bringing serious social science research to the space conversation.

Aerospace and engineering doesn't need our help. But space, and the space I described to you, near space, is really for humans. It is not deep space exploration. It is not Pluto or beyond. And so, we have a very weak system of governance, like treaties and more. And we're quickly, it's a frontier. And we don't have a very good history on planet Earth of, of dealing with frontiers gracefully. 

And so, you know, what are the legal killing people? So, yeah,  the economics, what are the, and, and ultimately again, what is it spaces for humans to thrive and work in? What are the rules who sets the rules? How do we go from a paramilitary preconception of what space looks like, right? It all looks like Star Trek, which is still  paramilitary, right?

After science expeditions. Anyway, so that's what we do at the Oxford Space Initiative. So we look at governance and commerce and ethics, things like who should have access to space. And our effort is to bring. Oxford and other and partner institutions to the table with, you know, the SpaceX is and the NASA's to talk about things other than, well, the rocket land a little bit over work, but it's like, will we be proud of what we're doing?

Once we're there, will we be safe?  We would kill each other.  Yeah, you mentioned governance and ethics, and certainly that's what's needed as AI evolves. So, you know, maybe Oxford has a whole AI initiative. I don't know if they're in the loop, but Actually, they have one of the biggest private endowments in the world, working on AI.

And these things, like I was saying, those Those six systems are becoming closer and closer and closer. I mean, a huge amount of AI investment is being made right now by the world's militaries in situational awareness. And so that's, that's not nothing in terms of an advanced block of Technology happening that and again, these things all connected  awesome.

Listen, Laura. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. I want you to come back and talk to us is as your passion progresses and and for those of you listening. Thanks for tuning in and catch more of our realm IQ sessions on your favorite podcast platforms like Spotify Have a podcast, Amazon Music, iHeart Podcast, Google Podcasts, and YouTube, and so please follow and smash that subscribe button.

Okay, thanks so much, Laura, and Godspeed as you race into space and climate and near space.  You got it. 

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