Taught at Fuqua: The AI Footprint #shorts #ai

Good afternoon. The reason I launched a new class called the AI footprint is that it is very clear that the environmental and social impacts of AI will be massive. And that the potential benefits of these systems, both environmentally and socially, will also be massive. And that a lot of the decision-makers that will be driving the future of these systems will be the businesses that are building these systems and using them. This is a big infrastructure play, maybe the biggest infrastructure play ever. I'm making the case that not just the energy, climate, water, land, e-waste footprint, but also the social impacts on labor force, these kinds of issues are really critical. And even though they will be evolving in society, they're going to create real big challenges for business leaders. I think the exciting thing for our students who get trained in this combination of climate and environmental science on one side, as well as policy, along with their business education, is that those are really complementary capabilities that are both needed to make good decisions around these systems. We're building out infrastructure systems. And so, to understand the amount of emissions that are embedded in these systems that will be assets that will live for 40 or 50 years, it's really critical that you understand the constraints environmentally as well as the impacts environmentally of these systems. And I think people who have only a business background probably are not going to have a very rich or nuanced understanding of the kind of impacts of the equation. On the other hand, what business offers is the chance to create solutions, to scale them, to bring capital to where it's most needed, and to create markets for new products that can really transform the way that the economy works. So, I think our educational programs that provide that kind of hybrid education are really exactly the kind of skills that they're going to need to go into these diverse, interdisciplinary, multi-industry, multi-sector kind of conversations, very challenging, very complex, very contested spaces, and be able to find solutions that meet everybody's needs.