Robert Downey Jr. attended Amazon’s new open-to-the-public Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space (Re:MARS) tech conference in Las Vegas as a keynote speaker. By the end of his speech, he had entertained and inspired a room filled with artificial intelligence legends, astronauts, and other dignitaries.
The climax of his talk was when he announced that he was launching a new initiative called Footprint Coalition. The goal of this new organization is to use robotics, artificial intelligence, and technology to clean up the Earth and reverse its carbon footprint in a decade. It sounds like a task fit for a superhero, but what could you expect from the man that played the part of a brilliant scientist, Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, for the past 11 years!
“Quick disclaimer, I don’t pretend to understand the complexities we face as a species, just because I portrayed a genius in my professional life,” Downey said.
The Footprint Coalition is committed to using advanced technologies for the good of the environment. “Between robotics and nanotechnology, we could clean up the planet significantly, if not totally, in 10 years,” Downey Jr. said, relaying that he had been given these insights a few weeks back by a roundtable of experts. “God I love experts. They’re like Wikipedia with character defects,” he joked during his talk.
No solid details were shared on how the organization was going to achieve its goal, but Downey Jr. did say that even making a small dent could be the most important thing he had ever done. The Footprint Coalition is scheduled to officially launch by April of 2020. However, the organization is so new that even the website for the group went live just after he left the stage, and it currently features little more than a newsletter sign-up form.
Nevertheless, he is working with very smart people to make this happen, and the ambition to make a difference is there. Throughout his speech, Downey Jr. painted AI as a significant technological advancement that gave him hope — and he also admitted that he found himself alarmed over the state of the environment. “I have this quiet sense of crisis,” he said, acknowledging that he had contributed more than others to the climate crisis. “I’m a one-man carbon footprint nightmare colossus.”
