One of my last talks representing Scott Logic was a pretty big one! A keynote at HM Treasury’s Innovation Day (ID25) at Horse Guards with Suzanne Angell, to government and industry leaders on how the UK can lead in AI that is both powerful and sustainable. A panel discussion chaired by Jess McEvoy, with government panellists, followed.
The talk reframed innovation and sustainability as forces that strengthen each other rather than compete. It covered:
- Measuring first, using open source standards such as DIST and TCS with its upstream, operational and downstream view of technology emissions. Hardware procurement is often a bigger share of the footprint than operational energy.
- The limits of “brute force” AI: huge compute and energy demands (sometimes met directly by gas turbines), e-waste from fast-obsolescing hardware, model collapse from synthetic training data, and a lack of transparency about the true costs.
- A human-led path: embedding sustainability in procurement, right-sizing models with domain-specific rather than general-purpose ones, and spreading compute from centralised cloud to private infrastructure and edge AI. That last point sweats existing devices rather than buying new ones, “from clock towers to wristwatches”.
- The UK opportunity: turning regulation and grid constraints into a spur for efficient, transparent, trustworthy specialist models, in the tradition of ARM, Formula 1 and Rolls-Royce engineering.
Recording
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