Surveillance Expands, Automation Wants AI and Big Tech Tests Clean Tech

Hey everybody, welcome to Techstrong Gang and happy Monday. We're going to have a little chat today about a bunch of different things, some of which are very controversial, and some of which are hopefully going to end well for us. Just might be taking too much time, but it's at least a step in the right direction.

Let me welcome our guest today, Jon Swartz. How you doing, buddy? I'm good.

Good to see you all. Good to see you. Also joining us today, Stephen Foskett, Tech Field Day President.

How you doing, buddy? Good to be here, thanks. Excellent.

And Garima Bajpai, how you doing? Thank you. I'm good.

Good. From up north. Are you in Canada?

Yes, I am in Canada. Warm Canada. All right.

Not traveling, not bouncing around the world as we all sometimes have to do. All right. I'm going to jump into it.

Let's just start off Monday with something that's a little controversial. So, what sounded like something normal that you would do because, well, some people have been threatening tech execs, so that's bad behavior, and we don't want that to happen. But it also seems like maybe we're going too far.

And there's some concerns that says that the government is now tracking anybody who has anything negative to say about anything to do with data centers and tech, and creating a little list there. And, well, Bruce Schneier has a post up on Security Boulevard about that called Chilling Effect, and I think that headline kind of describes the issue in a nutshell right there. John, what's your take on what's going on here?

Yeah, this is really downright Orwellian. So, just to give credit where it's due, Wired came up with this. They did a Freedom of Information Act, and they found out that federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement have come up with this category.

It's a pretty vague category of citizens that they call anti-terrorist extremists. It's raising some civil liberties concerns. So FBI, DHS, and some local authorities are actively tracking these people, whoever they may be.

This is based on a memo that Trump sent out that instructs the Department of Justice to target individuals that harbor anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalism, and anti-terrorism ideologies, anti-technology extremist ideologies. So what exactly is that? It's pretty vague, and it's something that, I'll get to what Bruce wrote, but something that Alan wrote, which was really interesting, I think, and it was in Digital CXO, was this idea that for a long time, it was hard for governments to accumulate and collect data and then act upon it on individuals because it required a lot of investigation, analysts, informants, files, budgets, times, what have you.

And now, it's not as hard to do because of technology and specifically because of AI. And I think of all these different things we can do through computer vision systems to track people through images, video, data brokers compile information, agentic systems are being developed to monitor environments. And the chilling effects that Bruce wrote about are what's really interesting to me, because it's not just with the government, but it's starting to happen everywhere in terms of self-censorship.

And these are people in, I would say, non independent areas like academia and publishing, who are doing things such as censoring themselves in lectures and rewriting syllabuses, grant applications, publishing outlets, modifying language in media. So this is a really sinister thing that is, I think, growing in scope because it's so vague, and it's playing into this kind of George Orwell society. And I think AI is playing a part in it.

And I'm not going to blame AI, I'm going to blame the humans who are abusing the technology. But it's a lot of fodder and thought for where we're headed, especially in these kind of troubled times. Stephen, have we fallen down the surveillance state rabbit hole without realizing it?

Is that what's going on here? Well, I wouldn't say surveillance state so much as a surveillance apparatus. I was reminded when I was reading this Bruce Schneier article, actually.

It's funny, I read this this morning, I didn't realize that it was on Security Boulevard. It was just a really good article. And I was reading it, and then the next article that I read was about basically the challenges of removing those Flock license plate reader cameras from various towns and municipalities.

Mm-hmm. And one town that started putting plastic bags, black garbage bags over the cameras because they didn't know how to take them down from their own poles. And it's not the state that's doing this so much as everything that's non-state.

And so you look at these- So basically apps ... apps and focused organizations that are out there, tracking everything we do and compiling big lists of everything. And in fact, when the state has tried to play that game, there's been a lot of pushback.

I remember a recent story about the FBI trying to access a private advertising database. And the same thing with ICE. They were talking about them using advertising-based databases to track people, and talking about how bad that is.

And yet it was bad because the government was doing it, but there wasn't a lot of pushback about basically private companies doing this. And I think these companies have gotten really good at holding hands with the state and figuring out ways of doing things that would be completely and totally unacceptableIf the federal government did it, but yet for some reason is okay if it's a private, for-profit company. I don't know.

Garima, you live in Canada. Is there a sense of a fundamental right to, I don't know, privacy or some of these other issues that the state keeps them at arm's length or... Because I'm asking a question because if I look in London, it's still the most video heavily filmed city in the world.

So, nobody goes anywhere in London without somebody else knowing about it, and that may or may not be a bad thing, but where's the line? Yeah, and I think it's more of an ethics problem than a privacy problem because ethics has been everything around responsible technology adoption to privacy to anything what you could suggest is a blurring line between what you believe is right and what is actually right or is policy-driven right. So I think a few gaps, which I feel that, with this kind of technology adoption, the first thing what happens is that people have eroded trust on technology itself.

And that we have seen when I visit, let's say Germany, for example, people are hesitant to use credit cards and things like that, just because the erosion of trust has happened back in time. So it's the same thing which I feel that it puts pressure on people that how and where and what we should use technology for. And I think it's also, as I mentioned, that what you believe is right and what is actually right is there is a blurring line between that.

And video surveillances and these kind of things which are putting technology at a bad spotlight. I feel that there are corner cases, of course, but as Stephen Foskett mentioned, that private companies are in private partnerships, it's already happening. So what is the answer to this question?

I don't understand because we are moving from a open society, democratic ways of living to a more on-the-camera controlled ecosystem. I don't have an answer to this. All right.

Well, I'm going to put one out there and see how it goes. So the fundamental issue is that the same folks who are trying to influence an outcome, AKA politicians, are the same folks that are in charge of the apparatus. Mm-hmm.

So separate those two things and to say, look, we're going to create some sort of agency or independent body to manage all this stuff because while it is valuable in the sense that it does protect us and it does serve a useful purpose in that regard, it just seems to me that it gets abused by people who have some sort of other agenda that work that goes beyond that, and basically, they're trying to tamper down a discussion- Yeah ... because it goes against where their political funds are coming from or some other policy that they're trying to promote, which is a political discussion. So John, can we separate these things?

Yeah. One thing I'm glad you mentioned that, Mike, because one thing that I should have mentioned earlier is that they have this loose definition of what they refer to as these different anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-technology extremists. Except they do have their idea of how they want to define it.

So the guy who's in charge of counterterrorism is the infamous Sebastian Gorka. So his opinion is that left-wing extremists are a top counterterrorism priority. And so it does bleed into politics, and it does also probably bleed into those who agree with the administration and play along, like for instance, academia or some of the tech companies or publishers or some of the media companies.

And if they don't or if they push back, they will be designated or they will be sued or they will be bullied or cajoled in some way. And we're seeing instances of this across the board, and I think we're going to see more of them. So it is highly politically motivated, and they are creating the ground rules of which they are going to take advantage to our detriment.

And I'm so glad that Wired found out about this because if they hadn't done this Freedom of Information Act, I wouldn't have known about this memo. I wouldn't know about this. I would suspect they were doing it, but now we have it in black and white, and it's pretty chilling.

We're being watched. We're being surveilled, and based on our views, we could be punished. Yeah.

" So how do you kind of make this a point where people do feel that they are being cajoled deliberately using digital technologies to not be as, shall we say, vehement on a particular topic, or do where they got to go whisper somewhere offline to each other to get a point across? Yeah, that's the concern, isn't it? Because I think that in many cases, a lot of the anti-technology, anti-capitalist sentiments that are being targeted here are sentiments that would be shared by an awful lot of people.

I don't know about you, but my Facebook feed, my social media feed is filled with people who are very angryAbout AI encroaching on their everyday lives, about the construction of data centers, about the incredible dominance of a few incredibly wealthy people on everything that they see and do. And this is not technology insiders. This is my parents' generation and my kids' generation, and they're very angry about this.

And I think that reading this at face value, those people's views could be targeted by this. Mm-hmm. And I think that maybe that's the answer.

Sure, if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't worry about hiding, right? That's what people say. But the truth is, once the sort of views that are shared by everyday people are targeted, then I think we're all going to be having something to hide.

" Yeah. And I'm hoping that that's sort of what's going to happen next. And in fact, I think it is.

If we take this to the logical conclusion, remember, we do have an election coming up in November. I would be shocked if there aren't left-leaning politicians who lean into anti-AI, anti-data center, anti-capitalist, anti-sentiment as the planks of their campaign. And I would be shocked if laws like this aren't used to target and maybe persecute those people.

That's when this, I think, will become real to regular, everyday Americans. I think I was going to take it a little step further in employees within tech companies or those who object to the behavior of their company or some of the things they're doing. There has been a movement within places like Google and Meta to push back and to speak up.

But I'm wondering now that those companies are laying folks off or retrenching, whether some of the comments of employees who talk counter to tech or say something that doesn't align with the administration are more apt to be laid off than others who toe the company line. We're starting to see examples of that, and there have been examples of that happening. I wonder if we're going to see more of it.

Right. But how far can it go, too? Let's think about this.

How often have you been sitting around with your family talking about something, or having a chat with your buddies over a beer about a particular topic, and then lo and behold, you pick up your phone and there's an interesting ad about the very thing you were talking about on your Facebook feed, even though you didn't actually go into that? So clearly somebody's picking up something from the general voice- Yeah. It's funny because you say that.

I get texts, actually. I'm not commenting as much as just kind of viewing certain contents, and I'm getting texts for fundraising or from particular politicians based on something that I said. It's pretty spooky.

Yeah. I'd like to jump in on that one. People think that.

I'm going to say no. I hope you're right. The creepy thing is not that your phone and devices are listening in on you.

The creepy thing is that these data systems have gotten so good that they don't need to listen in. They don't need to have the microphone running and listen to what you're talking about because if you're talking about it, then somebody in your circle Googled it, or somebody looked at an article or even paused just so slightly while scrolling through social media on a picture of that thing. That's the creepy thing.

It's not that they're listening. Yeah. It's that they don't need to.

And I would extend this because I think the scope creep of this policy is very easy to happen, right? You can see you put one policy against one kind of behavior, and then how it expands to other areas. And how do you control that?

And this is what a reflection about once it is allowed, and it's kind of creeping into every domain. So I feel that it's very hard when technology enters into this kind of arena. It's hard to control and do a scope due diligence.

What it was meant for and what it is doing right now. Mm-hmm. The data's so good about us that, it's not just politics.

I get suggestions on books or concerts to go to all the time without actively seeking it. So it knows. The ether world knows me as well as anyone, so...

It knows you better than yourself sometimes. The other part of this that I find troubling, just to put it out there, and so we're going to call out anti-tech, but we're also calling out anti-Christian. So does that mean it's okay to be anti other religions because we're going to protect one more than the others?

Because I find that a little objectionable, but that's just me. A lot of us are not okay with that. And I would say too, that I certainly think that the current administration especially has been very anti-anti-Semitism.

So that bodes, I don't want to say bodes well, but at least that is an area that they would be focused on. But that's a real good point. Is wishing somebody a joyous Eid anti-Christian?

What about a holy celebration? Is that anti-Christian? Because I don't think so, but I suppose somebody could think it is.

I guess. John, do you feel that people don't understand this, or the nuances or the particulars of it, but they definitely have a sense of the feeling, to Stephen's point, and is it going to become a more significant political discussion? Oh, I think it is.

I think it already is. Once we get past these June primaries, we get closer to the November election cycle, you're going to see a lot. We're already seeing a lot of discussion around data centers, around the big tech, around the bros.

The irony is there's a billionaire running for governor in California who is anti-tech, who's saying he's going to tax the billionaires. That's Tom Steyer. And then you have a guy who's further down the food chain in terms of the election, who is a former mayor of San Jose, who is a kind of a representative tech, because he comes from tech, who's trying to push back against that.

So you see that not just in California, but I also think you're going to start seeing things like this in Texas, Louisiana, Nevada, around not in my backyard data center pushback. Just the idea that these people are just exceedingly, obscenely rich and getting richer when we have affordability issues, gas is through the roof. People are very angry about the situation they're in, and then they see what's going on in tech, which is just flourishing.

Mm-hmm. Well, I'm going to put in a vote for transparency. I think that, regardless of what party you're in, maybe it's time for somebody in Congress to put together a couple of committees, at the very least, to have a discussion about what's going on here, because it's a little bit beyond the pale, shall we say.

All right. I'm going to move to our next subject, which is all about the joys of automation. And that's one subject that's close to Garima's heart.

But Alan, who's not here, was at an event here last week from Automation Anywhere, and they are one of several in this particular space. But there's been this conversation that goes, "Well, we have AI, so we're going to automate everything with AI, but we also have all these automation frameworks," and whether they come from Automation Anywhere or Zapier or somebody else, but maybe even Ansible. But Garima, what is the relationship between all these AI things and all these automation frameworks we have, and does one supersede the other, or are they kind of joined at the hip in some way we haven't quite figured out?

So, my view is automation is not AI, and we need both of them. But the articles which we are referring today would have a perspective on how we move forward with people who have already put a lot of effort on automation and bringing AI into the same context. So people like Anita Shukla and the likes of them, and also if you read through this article, "The automation layer wants its own enterprise AI," both reflect the same perspective, that they are thinking about bringing a horizontal layer of automation fabric, which is basically treating AI as not as a feature, but as a layer or a fabric which is horizontally cutting across the ecosystem.

So it's not only about one function or one stack with IT, finance, supply chain, or customer experience. It coordinates work across multiple systems, which is a no-brainer, and it has its own positives because, the agents which will execute on top of it have a baseline or an engine to kind of work on. So it becomes an operating layer for the agents.

But the problem with this kind of approach is the governance and ownership, and this is not limited to these articles only. It's also holistic, like who owns the guardrails of this kind of automation layer? If your agents behave in an appropriate manner or not, what kind of stack you're pulling across, and who owns the data beneath it.

So there are certain kind of arguments which Mihir puts onto the table with this article, where he says that there has to be a three-pillar framework, which is the unified data, agentic execution layer, and the governance, and the guardrails across it. The problem with this approach, what I see is that the framework is intertwined with a vendor-centric approach, which probably will not fly. But again, the concept is good.

It creates also a high dependency on data maturity. When you think about enterprises, like the silos have existed from ages here. So how do you cut across the data maturity of different functions?

Again, it's also a problem of how you orchestrate this within an organization, because it's more of an organizational change rather than a technology pivot. And then again, when a big bang transformation like this happens, it's like overextending your risks. So all in all, it's needless to say that this is in making.

This whole operating model where we have a fabric of data which is lying underneath, it is in making. The operating model itself is being rewired. It's not just only tools or siloed functions, but the convergence of platform will take time.

It will also take time to kind of have accumulative adoption. And we have not even thought about the wider kind of problems when we pivot to a cumulative model, what kind of risk cumulation we are doing. So I think all in all, my take on this is that it is needed.

It's likeSomething which is in making. It's too soon to advocate for this kind of a data fabric and the operating layer or a new operating model. I think it will happen in increments and people will pivot to this kind of layered architecture model.

If this will be a three-pillared architecture, which Mihir is advocating for, or it will be something else, we'll have to see in the coming times. Stephen, there's an irony in all this in my mind, and maybe you'll share it, but I'm going to put it out there. But I feel like, so people are complaining about their AI agents are costing them too much to run, and I'm putting so much stuff into the context window to account for that fact.

" And yet we've had these automation frameworks for years, and aren't we just kind of, theoretically at least, we should just figure out what should run where, and the automation frameworks are going to be less expensive to handle certain tasks and not just shove everything in the AI agent. What do you think? I think that sounds like a great idea, Mike.

Thank you. Yeah, I, like Garima, I've been interested in process automation for a long time. And I love companies like Automation Anywhere.

By the way, they presented at Tech Field Day eight years ago, seven years ago. So it's really cool to see how they've grown since then. You mentioned Zapier.

I'm a heavy Zapier user. I'm also a contributor to open source projects focused on automation frameworks. And Garima and I had a conversation at AI Field Day about this, along with some of the other delegates.

I really wish that instead of reinventing the wheel and centering it solely on LLMs, we could leverage some of the existing process automation framework and understanding and capability and use LLMs in a smart way to assist it. I actually just wrote an article on LinkedIn about another company, Fizant, that's using LLMs to do some of the things that those of us who were trying to do process automation found really difficult, and that is basically taking documents and extracting useful information out of them in a way that your process workflow can use. I myself have been doing that with LLMs as well.

It's a really great use of the technology that doesn't fall victim to, as you said, the sort of the hallucination, the massive memory footprint, et cetera, because essentially you're using the LLM for what it's good at, which is unstructured analysis, and then taking that and using deterministic tools that we've had for a long time to do the things that they're good at, which is basically workflows and so on. I do envision a future where this is not at all uncommon and where people are going to be increasingly using traditional tools, like Automation Anywhere, with new tools based on transformer models and large language models and kind of getting the best of both worlds. I think that would be a much better solution than just basically trying to make an LLM do something that it's just not good at.

Mike, I think one thing which I like about this article and approach is that people should start thinking about interoperability, for example. If you have big enterprises, this is a problem for real, right? So if you don't start to think about the foundation layer and the standards beneath it and how do you adopt technology in one way, because democratization is exciting for experimentation.

When it leads to scaling initiatives, it has to be some set of guidelines and frameworks in. I like this approach of putting together a view. I don't know if it is the only view.

Maybe it will improve. And I also want to bring one focus to the founder of Automation Anywhere, because she's a woman and I do hear her in interviews, and she's a super smart lady. I think she puts responsible AI at the core of everything, what they do.

So this is, again, I feel that this needs to be done. I don't think so if this is the right time to advocate for a big bang transformation. That's what I feel that might be a missing piece of the puzzle.

So to that end, Garima, I had a question for you. I don't want to put you on the spot, but maybe you can answer it. So if automation platforms are established as the core operational layer, how would this change how enterprises build, deploy, and manage daily workflows?

I think one of the biggest problems what we see today is security gaps and how we align to those. So we have a single point of accountability and exposure to that. So if we bring some kind of wrappers and solutions on top of that data fabric layer, I think it can resolve a lot of issues from that perspective.

Being an enterprise leader, this is one of the topmost concerns I have when I instrument or adopt new technology, right? So that's one thing. And then, again, I answered your question in my previous- Oh, yeah ...

equaling of how interoperability is also very important for enterprises. If you connect the dots with, let's say, siloed functions, and if there are more democratization on how people are adopting this technology, it will become very complex. I think we'll have to simplify the footprint of this whole ecosystem.

So to that point, we have a handful, I think, of open source automation frameworks, and Ansible is one of them. But for the most part, these things are proprietary, right? They're put out by, and I can think of, there's probably a dozen vendors in this space already.

Mm-hmm. But I also know that the open source community, when it gets annoyed by something, focuses on it, and I think they're about to get annoyed by this. So, the question I have for Garima is, where's that line going to be between what the open source community can do and maybe what a proprietary automation engine does?

And is there work to be done here to create, I don't know, some sort of standard interoperability layer, or we just need to go full boat open source, and we're going to have a workflow automation engine because, well, I got this little AI coding thing and I can build one. Exactly. So it's the same discussion which we have for build versus buy, right?

So open source, you can see that open source would be building up standards and it will take some time, and this will kind of pivot two different directions. So there will be different foundations. And that is one thing if you have the time at hand, and you have the patience to kind of work around this problem, that's your solution.

I think big enterprises would go the buy direction, buy a technology and kind of outsource this to a technology vendor who can solve this problem from an operating layer perspective. Now, in due course of time, I think standardization would happen eventually, and people will kind of translate their platforms into more standardized way of working. But I do believe that it will take some time to open source to catch up on these things while these platforms make the opportunities there for them.

Yeah. On that note, I would say that most of the open source projects are actually surprisingly capable. Activepieces and ed8n, for example, are both really excellent projects that you should look into, but they're not really a competitor for an Automation Anywhere so much as more of a Zapier, simply because the kind of people that are interested in contributing to an open source project are interested in a more, I don't know, social media composition type framework rather than an enterprise automation platform like Automation Anywhere.

And I think that's good. I'm not sure that we're going to see a lot of open source enterprise-grade software of any category, simply because the people that contribute to it may not be interested. On the other hand, think about Red Hat, think about Canonical.

Those companies could actually be very active in this space, and I'd love to see what they do, for example, with an Ansible type approach to automation. Right. I'm going to leave this here because Stephen just dared the open source community, and we'll see how that turns out later.

Yeah. All right. Now, I do want to turn to one of Stephen's favorite topics, though.

And there's a whole movement now around clean tech that people are talking about. And one of the things that we're looking at here is, well, the big vendors got together and said that they were going to put something together for a clean tech testing effort around AI infrastructure, especially. " But Stephen, isn't this kind of like the oil industry saying that they're going to clean up stuff after they've already kind of messed it up in the first place?

But I don't know. Well, a little bit. But let me just start by saying that this data center innovation initiative is actually started by legit people.

So this is actually an initiative of what's called Elemental Impact. Elemental Impact was once Elemental Accelerator, which is a nonprofit climate research VC fund, essentially established by something called Emerson Collective, which is the company of Laurene Powell Jobs, who you may know as Steve Jobs' widow, all-around amazing philanthropist who funds all sorts of really worthwhile things and owns The Atlantic. So, to say that this is basically the foxes guarding the henhouse is really not true.

I think that Elemental Impact is a legit and respectable organization. That being said, Elemental Impact has had limited impact in the last few years. As preparation for this, I was looking at their annual reports, and it looks like...

So as of 2024, they said that they've done $105 million in investment. As of 2026, it says they've done $106 million of investment. That's not a lot more over the last couple of years.

In fact, it's just about $1 million. And $1 million invested compared to the amount of money that's gone into data centers and chips and AI, et cetera, is, let's say, not even a drop in the bucket. This is sort of a mist wafting over the bucket in terms of impact.

So I'm not sure really if this is going to have much impact. "And especially in the current political climate, I don't think that an environmentally focused VC fund is really going to get all that far. But I do think one that could reduce the power demands or the cooling demands of data centers, yeah, that could work.

So I am cautiously optimistic. All right. Well, who needs Al Gore when you have Steven to share some inconvenient truths?

But John, do you think that these companies are serious about this, or is this just kind of like some- Well, they're listening to the wind, they're listening to the politicians, so they have to address these major issues people have. And there are major legitimate issues people have about energy use, their environment, what's happening to the land around them. We talked about this last week, these are massive, like Central Park-size facilities in some cases.

And so yes, I think they are speaking because they have to, but I also think it's within their interests, as Steven mentions. If there's a long-term profitability path or some sort of way they can enhance their services, then they're open to it. But again, it's all based on the motivation of ROI, and I think for now it's just kind of a nod to the pitchfork crowd that's getting louder and louder each week.

Right. So this initiative will fund 10 startups with up to 5 million USD, right? And I agree that what these people are trying to do is looking at the spillovers of decarbonization, which is basically efficient cooling, how we can treat storage and materials, and areas where they're spending money, and probably those are the quick wins.

If these areas can be made more efficient, I think it will be a win-win for both parties. So I believe that these 10 startups, which they pick would be somewhere around those dimensions. I believe that 5 million isn't probably going to go very far across 10 startups, but that's a whole other issue.

I would say this, though. It's only a matter of time before there's a lawsuit about all this stuff, and somebody starts going through people's emails in much the way that we saw with the cigarette industry and the oil industry, and they discover that folks involved knew a lot more than they let on at the time. And that they're going to wind up having to pay for something in a rather expensive way because they basically willfully ignored known science about these things and wound up building something that was hazardous to the environment on purpose because somebody told them that that was the way we needed to monetize AI faster.

Steven, am I crazy? Well, I don't think crazy. No.

I don't think that that's probably going to be what's going to move the needle here. I think that ultimately there are certainly going to be some cases made that the environmental impacts of some of these have really caused known problems. I'm specifically thinking of things like mobile gas turbine generators that have been deployed to power data centers and things like that, that they know are harmful, that they know are not just harmful to the environment, but to people who live around the data centers.

And I think there will be definitely lawsuits related to that. But to hope that somehow that is going to curb... No, I think we need to rely on people's greed to curb the environmental impact of a lot of this stuff.

Here's my hope. My hope is that this is a blip, and that the tech industry will spend the next few years building systems that are more efficient, that don't consume as much power, don't require as much water, and they all seem like solvable problems. So my question is, John, is that where we're going to see this whole thing shift?

Yeah, maybe. I think that they have. I'm going to say this, they've shown open-mindedness to look into alternatives.

They know energy is so crucial, more crucial than ever, and there's a paucity of it, and they need to address this. And I think they will. They've found ways in the past to get around these types of issues.

So I think it's just a natural progression, although it's on a totally different scale than what we've seen before. We always throw out these numbers about AI infrastructure spending just among the four big companies. It's like 600 billion this year alone.

So I think they're looking internally, and I think they know things that we don't, so that's why they're starting to broach the topic and they're starting to make some of these, not concessions, but some of these kind of shifts to the future use of energy because I don't think they have a choice. Yeah. I'm more optimistic.

Initiatives like this, I'll tell you, there is intense research for low carbon material, right? So it's all about commercial readiness, and these kind of initiatives can also put forward that view of commercial readiness of these kind of technologies if we have specific sites where we have to pilot these. You look at it as a near term, what could happen is a lot of proof of concept or new research which kind of come to life and some kind of commercialization pivots.

Right. Well, it's weird because I'm adding now to my list of things that I try to remember to do to help save the environment, such as turning out the lights and maybe not randomly driving around as much. I'm adding to that list my prompts.

Do I really need to make a prompt for this thing? Is it really important, or am I wasting everyone's time? Well, I think your greed may stop you from doing that pretty soon as the true cost of those prompts and those tokens becomes more obvious.

I think that will naturally put a brake on some of this. All right. Steven is in the compensation drives behavior camp, but we'll see how it goes.

All right. Hey, I want to thank everybody for sharing their insights and knowledge as always, and we want to thank you all for spending some time with us. And please stay tuned for the rest of the Techstrong TV lineup because it too is as equally awesome as this show was, and we'll see you all tomorrow.