Amory Lovins

Given the incredible power of genetic engineering, it's no surprise that there are significant safety issues in its use.

My friend Amory Lovins recently co-wrote, along with Hunter Lovins, an editorial that provides an ecological view of some of these dangers.

Among their concerns, that the new botany aligns the development of plants with their economic, not evolutionary, success.

See A Tale of Two Botanies.

Maybe start before the book and the lead up to the first book and then tell us about the last 20 years briefly.

Well, I have a PhD in physics from MIT, and I ended up working with Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute, and he sent a letter to the people of the Department of Energy when the Clinton-Gore administration came in recommending a bunch of people for different jobs, and I ended up working for the Deputy Secretary of Energy, a guy named Bill White.

I was his special assistant for policy and planning, which meant he oversaw all of the energy programs.

And I kind of helped him do that, you know, helped him on the nuclear program.

The first principle of frugal AI that I found when I was reading about it and that you mentioned when you contacted me about this was efficiency.

And efficiency is just doing more with less, as my friend Amory Lovins would say right away.

Efficiency seems to begin with the use case.

That's what I'm reading in some Schneider Electric information.

Yeah, I, I do.

I channel the Amory Lovins mentality a lot, of people don't care about kilowatt hours and electrons.

Yeah.

[laughs]

And innovation studies was taking off.

And this was the moment in the late 90s where Amory Lovins and natural capitalism, green capitalism was emerging as a discourse there.

And so I ended up in a kind of a big EU-funded project thinking about green technology.

And I wrote my first paper on this, a green industrial revolution, question mark, is it going to happen? And trying to interrogate this kind of, if you like, this kind of eco-modern industry shift from a kind of sociological perspective.