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Transcript excerpt · English
On Valentine's Day 2022,
a pontoon bridge appeared near the border of Belarus and Ukraine.
One day, an empty river,
and the next day, a bridge.
I’m the cofounder of an Earth imaging company,
and with our satellites,
we can see the entire world every day.
And from space, we were able to detect that bridge,
zoom in,
and that picture was broadcast around the world the next morning.
Everyone could see that something was changing.
And then ten days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Thanks to satellite imagery, many governments and NGOs,
researchers and journalists,
they all had access to the same daily facts,
the same baseline of reality,
and the same possibility, at least in theory,
of seeing clearly enough to respond together.
And with that shared view of reality,
we’re no longer arguing if something is there
but deciding what to do because it is there.
In the days that followed that Valentine's Day bridge,
Western nations coordinated for severe sanctions against Russia
and unified in their support for Ukraine.
But for months beforehand,
we saw an increase of military activity
and tanks amassing at the border.
The signals were there.
Perhaps the allies stopped the worst from happening,
but they didn't stop the war.
And I sat with that for a really long time.
The satellites, they worked exactly as they were designed.
They showed the emerging threat.
They saw the threat.
But the institutions that were supposed to respond,
they weren't built for this.
The alliances, the frameworks, the coordination mechanisms,
they weren't built to handle signal at this speed
or to incorporate this amount of information.
And we built this extraordinary eye,
an independent source of truth about what's happening on the planet.
But an eye that's not connected to a functional nervous system
and a body capable of response,
that eye is just a witness.
But fortunately, new technologies are helping to close that gap.
When you take all of this earth data
and pair it with the analytical power of AI,
we can build extremely different things,
action in an entirely new way.
We're entering into an era that we call planetary intelligence,
where new capabilities in action can happen at the speed of change.
Now, my cofounder, Will, was on this spot in 2014,
and he shared with you all our dream.
What if we could image the whole world every day?
And he came back in 2018 with a new dream.
What if we can use AI to understand how the world is changing?
And today, that vision is becoming a reality.
And before I share that with you today,
I want to provide a little bit of context.
The space sector is going through a renaissance right now.
We have reusable rockets, thousands of satellites.
And for the first time in over 50 years,
we just sent humans to the moon and back.
NASA is inspiring us once again with this picture
to gain perspective that we live on this beautiful,
precious spaceship Earth that we call home.
And with hundreds of satellites that are all monitoring the planet,
they're getting connected to each other,
and we're putting a lot more compute next to it.
It's beginning to build a planetary nervous system.
And here on the ground,
we're all in amazement as AI just continues to accelerate at rapid speed.
And like many of you here,
I'm holding on to that polarity
between the sheer awesomeness of this technology,
and also a bit of anxiety
about how this comes into the world in the right way.
We have to get governance right,
and we have to get alignment right.
For AI to work for everyone
and the larger living world,
we need it to speak the language of the planetary systems
to which we're all embedded.
It must understand our infrastructure and human activity,
but also the impacts on the water, the trees and the soil.
So let me show you what this looks like.
So when you combine all of this Earth data
with AI and large language models,
we are allowing for global change to happen in near real time.
You can see change in just about everywhere
over vast distances and time.
It's helping to close that gap between awareness and action.
A farmer can understand how healthy their soil is.
An insurer can create a dynamic and custom policy
based on the real-time environmental risk of the asset.
And a finance minister,
they can account for the true cost of their financial economy
along with their rich, living, natural ecosystems.
So planetary intelligence guides our actions
much in the same way
that the eye connected to a nervous system guides the body
so that humanity is no longer a witness to what's happening.
We can become stewards for the planet and our society.
And we're already seeing glimmers of planetary intelligence
happening all over the world.
It is already measuring global change in near real time,
guiding human intervention where it's needed the most.
So let me show you a few examples.
First, let's go to Brazil.
The Brazilian Amazon is huge.
It's five million square kilometers,
roughly two thirds the size of the United States,
and it's brimming with rich biodiversity,
countless Indigenous communities.
And it's the home of about 20 percent of the planet's freshwater supply.
But deep in the dense forests of the Amazon,
there are illegal activities that are happening all the time.
Fields are cleared for illicit crops.
Runways are cut for narco traffickers.
Riverbeds are illegally mined and poisoning downstream communities.