++It turns out there was an “unlikely” chance the first atomic bomb could have ignited the atmosphere — which didn’t stop the Manhattan Project. +
++In one trailer for Oppenheimer, the movie about the making of the atomic bomb releasing on Friday, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) asks Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy): “Are we saying there’s a chance that when we push that button we destroy the world?” +
++The chance, Oppenheimer assures him, is “near zero.” +
++Groves is not wholly assuaged. “Near zero?” Oppenheimer, frustrated, asks what answer he wanted to hear. Groves, of course, speaks for the audience: “Zero would be nice!” +
++I would love to tell you that concerns that the first atomic bomb would destroy the world were made up to add some tension to the film. But no, some of the scientists building it were genuinely worried about the possibility. In 1942, Edward Teller, the researcher who later invented the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, gave a presentation in which he observed that an atomic explosion would create temperatures hotter than the sun — and maybe create the conditions under which fusion reactions (which had been discovered only a few years previously and were still poorly understood) could occur. +
++The upshot: There was a chance they could literally ignite the atmosphere, killing everything that depends on it. +
++Teller’s presentation caused a stir. Some physicists emphatically rejected the possibility. Other well-pedigreed ones were not as persuaded it could be ruled out, given how much they still didn’t fully understand about how nuclear reactions would happen. +
++The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in New Mexico commissioned a secret report, which concluded that this was “unlikely.” This set many fears to rest, but not all of them, and scientists kept rechecking their calculations up to the day of the test. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Compton — who later said that it would be “better to accept the slavery of the Nazi than run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind” — was among those who were less than sure right up to the moment of ignition. As the Manhattan Project’s physicists stood waiting for the test at Trinity site, he proposed, mostly jokingly, they place bets on whether they’d destroy life on Earth. +
++James Conant, then-president of Harvard University and a witness to the Trinity test, said later that when the flash from the test was unexpectedly much brighter and longer-lasting than they’d predicted, his instantaneous reaction was that they really had ignited the atmosphere and doomed the world. +
++We now know enough about fusion to know that nuclear bombs cannot ignite the atmosphere. But in his book The Precipice, existential risk researcher Toby Ord argues that the team at the time could not possibly have been wholly confident in their conclusions. Indeed, we know nuclear weapons scientists miscalculated from time to time: in one deadly mistake, the Bravo test of a hydrogen bomb, an explosion was much larger than calculated, exposing hundreds of people to radiation poisoning. (The scientists thought lithium-7 was essentially inert; in the Bravo explosion, a thousand times greater than that of Hiroshima, they learned that it was actually reactive at the right temperatures. Oops!) +
++It’s hard to feel like we got the Trinity one right — instead of just getting lucky. +
++How do you end up nervously joking about maybe ending the world? +
++What in the world moves decent, intelligent, careful, and thoughtful people — and many of the people working on the atomic bomb, including Oppenheimer himself most of the time, were decent, intelligent, careful, and thoughtful — to behavior that from the outside can look gravely irresponsible? +
++Ordinary people would presumably not agree to a scientific experiment with even a very small chance of destroying the world. That wouldn’t seem like an acceptable risk. We would want researchers to wait until they understood the science better and could be wholly confident that their project wouldn’t ignite the atmosphere. +
++Much of the answer lies in the geopolitical competition that the Manhattan Project scientists believed themselves to be in with the Nazis. The terrible logic of building the bomb was that if Hitler built it first, he could hold the whole world hostage and spread an ideology of unparalleled evil and destructiveness, so the only thing that mattered was getting there first. +
++That was the conviction in which the Manhattan Project was initiated. Of course, it eventually became clear that the Nazis were never close to completing an atomic bomb. In fact, by the time of the Trinity test — on July 16, 1945 — Germany had already surrendered. Even if taking risks with the fate of every single person alive was justified to stop Hitler, it had stopped being justified months before the Trinity countdown began. +
++If Oppenheimer leaves you with more questions than answers, Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a book I highly recommend to learn more about the Manhattan Project, the extraordinary personalities driving it, and how they made the decisions that eventually introduced atomic weapons to the world. It’s where I found my answer to this question, though it’s far from a fully satisfying one. +
++That answer is that they were too busy thinking about how to build the bomb to revisit the question of whether they should as the strategic situation changed around them. A project of the scope and scale of the Manhattan Project has stunning inertia. At extraordinary expense and great personal costs, under unimaginable pressure, the researchers had spent years of their lives building something wholly transformative and unprecedented. +
++Psychologically, they simply didn’t have it in them to quit their life’s work on the brink of completion just because the geopolitical justification they’d originally had was no longer valid, even if there were vague worries about igniting the atmosphere and more concrete worries about permanently changing the world for the worse. +
++They rechecked and rechecked their calculations, but they seemed to be thinking of matters as “we will go ahead with the test unless we discover that it’ll ignite the atmosphere” instead of “we won’t go ahead with the test unless we know enough about fusion to be absolutely confident it won’t,” much less “do we need to go ahead with the project at all now that the Nazis are beaten?” +
++Shortly after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, new President Harry Truman was briefed for the first time on the bomb. He wrote later that FDR’s close adviser Jimmy Byrnes told him they “were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.” And also, of course, “the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.” +
++A question of when, not whether +
++One gets the sense the latter consideration loomed larger. The Making of the Atomic Bomb characterizes Truman as impatient with being expected to read the long memos meant to bring him up to speed on the bomb project and laser-focused on its implications for the US/USSR relationship. Everyone moved on to deciding where to drop the bomb, presuming it worked; it’s not clear there was a single meeting in which they sat down and seriously discussed whether to go ahead at all. Aside from a few mavericks like the physicist Leo Szilard, who presciently warned that using the bomb would only encourage the Soviet Union to accelerate its own efforts, it was a question of when, not whether. +
++And that’s how you get the brightest minds in the world nervously joking that they hope they don’t end all life on Earth. +
++The people who built the Manhattan Project were absolutely brilliant. And so far, Earth has survived the introduction of their great invention. But this has always felt to me like a cautionary tale, not a triumphant one. +
++It’s easy to see why those physicists who were completely sure the atmospheric ignition was a fictitious worry went ahead with the test. But what about the ones who weren’t sure, and were joking about it nervously up to the last minute? Did they essentially let themselves get peer pressured into going ahead with a test that they thought might kill every person on the face of the Earth, for a reason (beating the Nazis) that no longer applied? Whose job was it, among genius scientists who were tasked with inventing a superweapon, to call it off if the benefits of a superweapon no longer seemed worth the risks? +
++If there’s an unrealistic part of Oppenheimer, it’s actually Maj. Gen. Groves, who in the trailer presses the scientist about whether even a small chance should be considered unacceptable. I have found no accounts that he, or anyone else outside the team of scientists who tried to check Teller’s calculations, ever seriously grappled with this worry. +
++Can a country be a climate leader without nuclear power? +
++FREIBURG, Germany — Earlier this spring, the German government closed down the country’s three remaining nuclear power plants — the last vestiges of what was once a large domestic fleet. +
++While not everyone in Germany supported the closures, many here — particularly supporters of the Greens (Die Grünen), one of the world’s strongest and most powerful environmentally focused political parties — viewed the event as the happy culmination of a decades-long battle to rid the country of nuclear energy. +
++“We are embarking on a new era of energy production,” said Steffi Lemke, a Greens member and Germany’s federal minister for the environment and nuclear safety, in a CNN interview following the plant closures. +
++Nuclear energy is a controversial topic in most places, but Germany is notable for its historic antipathy toward the technology. “Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is widespread and longstanding, and it’s highly correlated with concern for climate change,” says Pushker Kharecha, deputy director of the Climate Science, Awareness, and Solutions Program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. +
++In the United States, Gallop polls going back 20 years have found that Americans are generally split on the subject of nuclear energy, though support for nuclear has swelled in recent years. +
++For its part, the White House has invested heavily in sustaining the country’s nuclear infrastructure, and President Joe Biden has also touted nuclear as an important component in the country’s quest for carbon neutrality. Many countries are following the same path based on similar climate calculations, and some experts support this position. “Nuclear is actually one of the cleanest and safest energy sources,” Kharecha says. For countries that want to mitigate climate change and reduce air pollution, he says that nuclear energy should be embraced — at least until better options come along. +
++But environmental advocacy groups and left-leaning American voters have traditionally opposed nuclear power. And, despite the president’s efforts, recent Gallup data suggest this is still the case: Less than half of Democrats back nuclear, compared to 62 percent of Republicans. It’s not all that odd that environmentally conscious Germans would support finishing off the country’s long-dying nuclear sector. +
++What’s harder to square is that as Germany was finalizing its plans to shutter its remaining nuclear plants, it was also reactivating old coal-fired power facilities, mining more lignite (a.k.a. brown coal), and generally ramping up its use of fossil fuels to address energy shortages brought on by the conflict in Ukraine. According to figures from Germany’s Federal Statistical Office, one-third of Germany’s electricity in 2022 was generated from coal. That represents an 8 percent increase compared to 2021. Meanwhile, the country’s use of nuclear-generated electricity fell by almost 50 percent during the same period. +
++No less a climate-change evangelist than Greta Thunberg has argued publicly that, for the planet’s sake, Germany should prioritize the use of its existing nuclear facilities over burning coal. Yet this is not the way the country has gone, and there has been relatively little public protest or political handwringing over the increased use of coal-generated power to address its deficits. +
++Why would a country that stands out for its environmentalist bona fides — where the reality of climate change and the push for renewable energy sources has been embraced by all major political parties — choose coal over nuclear in the midst of an energy crisis? +
++A clearer understanding of Germany’s energy choices may help other countries, including the US, better assess the risks and rewards of nuclear power. +
++Germany’s complicated history with nuclear energy +
++Christoph Löffler was just 9 years old when a reactor melted down at the Soviet nuclear facility near Pripyat in what is now northern Ukraine. +
++“I was only 9, but I remember Chernobyl,” Löffler says. “There was a shortage of milk, and people here paid more — double the price — for milk produced before a certain date.” +
++Löffler, 46, is an otolaryngologist. He’s also my neighbor. We live in Freiburg im Breisgau, a university city in southwest Germany that is one the greenest regions of the country — both literally and politically. Freiburg is nestled on the western edge of the Black Forest. It is one of the most eco-conscious cities in Europe, and Greens politicians represent the mayorship and the largest bloc of the city’s municipal council. +
++To an American visitor, Freiburg is reminiscent of Berkeley or Santa Cruz — one of those lush northern California college towns where a disproportionate number of people ride bikes, wear Birkenstocks year-round, and rank climate change as the most important consideration when casting their votes. In late 2021, 12,000 people here marched in the streets in support of climate action. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24795520/GettyImages_1482411726.jpg)
Johannes Simon/Getty Images
++The local citizenry’s anti-nuclear zeal is everywhere in evidence; flyers and graffiti around the city advocate for a future without nuclear power. A popular bumper sticker here, one that dates back to the 1970s, depicts a smiling sun and the slogan “Atomkraft? Nein danke.” (“Nuclear power? No, thank you.”) +
++When I asked Löffler about nuclear energy, he talked measuredly about its pros and cons. “However, I am more against it than for it,” he concluded. +
++Like other Germans I spoke to for this piece, he brought up the threat of nuclear disaster as a strong argument against the use of the technology. Another friend, a teacher, asked me if pro-nuclear Americans had forgotten the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in Pennsylvania. (I have even seen newspapers here refer to nuclear power plants generally as “drei Meiler,” or “Three Milers.”) +
++Chantal Kopf, a Greens politician here in Freiburg and elected member of the Bundestag (basically, Germany’s House of Representatives), likewise raised the specter of a nuclear disaster. “As Greens, we’ve always had in our tradition a more critical perspective on whether humans are capable of controlling every circumstance, and we’ve already seen really catastrophic accidents,” she says. +
++The Chernobyl meltdown captivated and horrified many Americans. But while the US shuddered, Germans suffered directly from the disaster’s fallout. It wasn’t just a question of tainted milk. Radioactive particles drifted across much of the German landscape. Sandboxes were nicknamed “death boxes.” Contamination turned up in meat, vegetables, fruits, and foodstuffs produced all over the country, and frightened parents didn’t know what to feed their children. Some experts estimated that hundreds of thousands of people on the continent would eventually develop Chernobyl-related cancers. That didn’t come to pass, but recent government analyses of German wild mushrooms found that 95 percent of samples still contained radioactive contamination from Chernobyl, and the residue of that disaster has likewise soaked deep into the nation’s views on nuclear power. +
++“Chernobyl was much bigger and closer to home for Germans than anything Americans have experienced,” says Sarah Wiliarty, an associate professor of government at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. “It was very much a lived threat.” +
++Wiliarty has published work on the history of Germany’s nuclear industry. She says the country’s anti-nuclear movement emerged alongside the environmental movement in the 1970s, and Chernobyl helped weld the two together. +
++While overall support here for nuclear has ebbed and flowed over the years, the Greens Party has never wavered in its opposition to nuclear. And another, more recent disaster helped align the rest of the country behind the Greens’ anti-nuclear agenda. +
++After Fukushima +
++At least by American standards, the nations of Europe are small and packed together. Calamities that befall one country often have repercussions for their neighbors. +
++At the start of the conflict in Ukraine, many Germans feared that the fighting would soon find its way to their borders. Similar fears have cropped up whenever the fighting has raged near one of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities, including Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest atomic power plant. The destruction on June 6 of the Kakhovka Dam, which is the ultimate source of the plant’s cooling water, raised new fears of a possible nuclear disaster. +
++Some Germans I spoke with told me these sorts of threats are evidence that nuclear power is simply not worth the risk; even if you believe that operator or technological error has been removed from the equation — a debatable position — unforeseen events could still induce a nuclear accident. “There is always the potential for an attack — a terrorist or cyber or war attack like we’re seeing in Ukraine,” says Kopf, the Greens politician. “It may be a small chance something like that happens, but if it happens, the consequences are so dramatic.” +
++More than a decade ago, just such a dramatic event caused Germany to abandon its nuclear industry. +
++In March 2011, a massive earthquake and consequent tidal wave induced the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Just three days after that earthquake, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Germany’s two-party ruling coalition — which until that point had supported the continued use of nuclear energy — ordered the immediate closure of eight of the country’s 17 nuclear power plants. A few months later, the German Parliament approved, by a large majority, the total phase-out of Germany’s nuclear industry by the end of 2022. All of this helped accelerate the country’s shift toward renewable energies (namely wind and solar), which now generate about half of Germany’s electricity. +
++“Pre-Fukushima, the left [in Germany] had an anti-nuclear stance, but the right wing was more favorable to nuclear,” Wiliarty says. “After Fukushima, Merkel essentially said that if Japan can’t handle nuclear, we should not believe that we can handle nuclear, and most Germans agreed with her.” +
++Mentioning the legacy of WWII, Wiliarty adds that the possibility, however remote, of causing another tragedy on the European continent is enough to make nuclear energy a nonstarter for many Germans. (This may help explain why Germany continues to buy, situationally, nuclear-generated electricity from France even as it moves away from “homegrown” nuclear.) +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24795550/GettyImages_1246860455.jpg)
Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images
++However, it would be an exaggeration to say that all Germans are anti-nuclear. Especially since the conflict in Ukraine has weakened the country’s energy stability and sent energy prices soaring, Germany’s pro-nuclear camp has gained support. A 2022 poll found that a majority of respondents would be in favor of extending the life of the country’s existing nuclear facilities, though a majority still oppose the construction of new plants. +
++In many places, not just Germany, this is a significant point of debate and division. Using the nuclear facilities you already have is one thing. Building new ones is quite another. +
++Following a parent meeting at our children’s school, a friend of mine — a geologist named Peter Geerdts, 46 — scowled when he recalled the demolition in 2020 of the nuclear plants at Philippsburg, a town about 100 miles north of Freiburg. One of those plants still had years of operational lifespan. “What a waste,” he says. “That was a perfectly good piece of infrastructure.” +
++He says his country’s push for more green and renewable sources of energy is all well and good. But there are times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. With today’s technologies, renewables alone can’t meet his country’s needs. “So now we’re burning coal instead of using nuclear while trying to meet CO2 reduction targets,” he says. “It doesn’t add up.” Many I spoke with here voiced similar views. +
++But some energy experts I talked with said that, by and large, Germany has only shuttered nuclear plants that were end-of-life or otherwise unfit for service. “Most of the plants — except where the plants were having serious technical problems — were shut down when they would have been shut down anyhow,” says Miranda Schreurs, a professor of environment and climate policy at the Technical University of Munich. +
++On the broader question of whether the country’s abandonment of nuclear energy has made sense, she says that it has certainly involved uncomfortable trade-offs. “The priority no doubt has been the move away from nuclear, not coal,” she says. “But the German response isn’t either-or, it’s how do we get both out of the system as quickly as possible.” +
++Germany has committed to ending its use of coal by 2030. It has also become one of the world leaders in the development and use of renewables, something Schreurs says has only been possible because money and other resources that would have been sucked up by nuclear energy have instead been funneled into renewable technologies. +
++However, some argue that the country’s anti-nuclear priorities have come at a steep cost. +
++Does nuclear make sense for Germany — or for any country? +
++There are some unimpeachable justifications for opposing nuclear energy. There’s the risk of a catastrophic accident, first and foremost, and also the problem of storing or disposing of nuclear waste. +
++“From our point of view, it’s not right to say nuclear is a sustainable technology,” says Kopf, the Greens politician. “You need uranium, which is not extracted in an environmentally friendly way, and there is no real solution for nuclear waste.” +
++However, when making energy trade-offs, these risks must be balanced against the harms associated with the use of non-nuclear energy sources — such as air pollution and CO2 emissions produced by fossil fuels. According to estimates from Our World in Data, nuclear is cleaner and safer than any power source apart from solar. The number of deaths caused by either accidents or air pollution as a result of nuclear power is estimated to be just 0.03 deaths per terawatt-hour of energy produced. That is far, far below the 18 deaths and 25 deaths per terawatt-hour associated with oil and coal sources, respectively. +
++Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks the world’s countries in terms of their climate-change measurables, such as greenhouse gas emissions. Germany now slots in at 14th, one spot ahead of the United States. While a top-15 ranking is decent enough, nearly all of the other countries near the top of the index have improved their EPI score during the past decade. Germany’s score, on the other hand, has fallen, and that’s due mostly to the country’s CO2, NO2, and other fossil fuel emissions. Germany has the third-most “carbon intensive” electric grid among European countries, and by some estimates, the amount of carbon dioxide it emits to generate electricity is multiples higher than many of its neighbors. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24795556/GettyImages_1482410709.jpg)
Johannes Simon/Getty Images
++These emissions harm the planet, but they’re also poisonous for people. “By pursuing their complete nuclear phase-out policy over the past decade while continuing to heavily use fossil fuels, Germany has lost the opportunity to prevent thousands of premature air pollution-induced deaths,” says Columbia University’s Kharecha. +
++His comments are grounded in some of his own peer-reviewed research. Similar analyses, including a more-recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US-based nonprofit, have likewise found that Germany’s withdrawal from nuclear resulted in thousands of preventable deaths, mostly due to air pollution caused by the burning of coal. That NBER paper also concluded that the phase-out cost the country $12 billion. +
++Kharecha acknowledges that Germany has done “a very impressive job” of rapidly scaling up solar and wind sources of energy production. But he says the unreliability of renewables requires supplementation with other sources, and that’s where nuclear is needed. “Nuclear provides continuous ‘baseload’ power,” he says. “Renewables and nuclear really should be viewed as complementary choices, not binary ones.” +
++But other energy experts say renewables and nuclear make poor bedfellows. “One of the issues with nuclear is its inflexibility — it either operates at 100 percent or zero, and you can’t just flip a switch and turn it on or off,” says Andrzej Ancygier, a lecturer at New York University’s Berlin satellite campus and a senior energy and climate policy analyst at Climate Analytics. For renewables to work at scale, he says, flexible complementary energy sources are needed, and nuclear isn’t that. +
++Also, nuclear power plants have a finite lifespan. To extend that lifespan requires significant investments of both cash and time, and may come with mounting risks. “Operating a plant longer than is planned … in my opinion, it’s dangerous, but I can understand the discussion there,” Ancygier says. On the other hand, he argues that building new nuclear facilities now, in 2022, makes little sense: “Economically and from a climate change perspective, it is complete nonsense. They’re much, much more expensive than renewables, they come with more risks, and they always take much longer to build than planned.” +
++Schreurs, the Technical University of Munich professor, makes a similar point. She says that very few Western nations, even pro-nuclear countries, have managed to build new nuclear plants in recent years. Those that have tried — for example, the UK’s still-in-progress Hinkley Point power plant — have run into major delays and massive budget overruns. “The upfront costs of nuclear are immense, and the time to build new plants is on average something like 10 years,” she says. “If you’re talking about building new facilities to reduce emissions quickly, it’s hard to argue for nuclear over renewables.” +
++Columbia’s Kharecha agrees that high costs and long lead times are arguably the biggest challenges for new nuclear. But he says these are solvable problems, and history has shown that they can be overcome. “France and Sweden built lots of reactors very rapidly, decades ago, and neither country has experienced major problems with them,” he says. +
++But here again, there are valid counterarguments. In 2022, more than half of France’s nuclear reactors were shut down unexpectedly for maintenance reasons, and the country had to rely on German energy imports to meet its shortfalls. Schreurs highlights these problems as evidence that nuclear too can be unreliable. +
++What’s next for Germany? +
++Germany’s move away from nuclear and toward renewables has forced it to rely on fossil fuels. Proponents of this strategy say this reliance is temporary — a short-lived trade-off that, in the long run, will allow Germany to power itself cheaply, safely, and sustainably. +
++Some will no doubt scoff at this argument. In the US, many still view solar, wind, and other renewables as unreliable energy sources that cannot anchor a country’s electricity industry. But even some American observers say the German view of renewables’ potential may be closer to reality. +
++“When Germany first pivoted away from nuclear and prioritized renewables in 2000, a lot of people said this is insane, but they’ve had a lot more success than many anticipated,” says Wesleyan’s Wiliarty. “I think getting to a point where they’re not using nuclear or fossil fuels is realistic. The question is, how long will it take?” +
++Ancygier echoes these sentiments. He says German policymakers have at times vacillated in their support for renewables — something that has slowed progress. But while some political dissent persists, the current government has affirmed its commitment to renewables, and its stated policy aims are for these sources to make up 80 percent of the country’s electricity production by 2030. +
++The great debate over nuclear energy is sure to rage on, both here and in the United States. In the end, the lesson other countries may take from Germany is that abandoning nuclear in favor of safer and greener renewables is possible but that it comes with uncomfortable trade-offs. It also requires political will and broad public support. For much of the past 20 years, Germany has had both. Whether it can sustain them will likely determine how much success it has, and how quickly that success comes. +
++Markham Heid is a freelance journalist who chiefly covers health and science. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and other outlets. +
++America’s biggest companies are hiring AI leadership as fast as they can. +
++If AI is coming for our jobs, many Americans are hoping to get out in front of it. Regular people are using AI at work, and tech workers are rebranding themselves as AI experts. And those in leadership are vying for the hottest new job title: head of AI. +
++Outside of tech, the head of AI position was mostly nonexistent a few years ago, but now people are taking on that title — or at least its duties — at everywhere from Amazon to Visa to Coca-Cola. In the US, the number of people in AI leadership roles has grown threefold in the past five years, according to data from LinkedIn, bucking the downward trend in tech hiring overall. And while the head of AI job description varies widely by company, the hope is that those who end up with this new responsibility will do everything from incorporating AI into businesses’ products to getting employees up to speed on how to use AI in their jobs. Companies want the new role to keep them at the forefront of their industries amid AI disruption, or at least keep them from being left behind. +
++“This is the biggest deal of the decade, and it’s ridiculously overhyped,” said Peter Krensky, a director and analyst at Gartner who specializes in AI talent management. +
+ ++Like anything new in tech, the AI revolution can take on a bit of a gold-rush quality. AI is one of the few areas where companies are actively spending money, since they see it as the inevitable future and as a way to improve their bottom line. At the same time, the parameters of the head of AI job — and even AI itself — aren’t very clear, and the pivot to the position can seem opportunistic. Remember Shingy, AOL’s Digital Prophet? +
++The thing is that while everyone seems to agree that companies need AI stewards, the nature of new technology means many are uncertain as to what that stewardship means in practice. Furthermore, we’re not sure about who exactly should become the new stewards: the people who have been working on AI for years or those who have been introduced to AI by the latest crop of consumer products and understand how the rest of us use it. We’re also not certain just how big of a disruption AI will be and how fast that disruption will happen. +
++Those are just some of the reasons companies are hiring heads of AI. And if they don’t already have a head of AI, most big companies will have one soon. +
++“If I were talking to a CEO a year ago, and I was like, ‘You’d be a fool not to have a head of AI.’ They’d be like, ‘Come on, give me a break,’” said Krensky. “And now they’re like, ‘I know, that’s why I have one.’” +
++Krensky estimates that currently about a quarter of Fortune 2000 companies have dedicated AI leadership at the VP level or above. He expects it to be about 80 percent a year from now. While the position will be more commonplace at bigger companies — especially those in banking, tech, and manufacturing — he’s also seeing it crop up at midsize organizations and in government agencies. +
++Typically, the person taking what Kensky calls a “cool and sexy” job title — one that he says is often a “hat, not a role” — comes from an existing technology leadership position like chief data officer or chief information officer. But the accessible nature of generative AI tools and their potential use across industries and positions has meant that people in nontech roles like business and marketing are also donning the mantle. +
++And because AI is supposed to be more transformational and more readily profitable than tech fads like Web3, experts think the head of AI is also going to stick. +
++“This is going to be a role that will stay on for a while. It’s not a transitional role,” said Beena Ammanath, executive director of the Deloitte AI Institute. “It’s absolutely crucial.” +
++Just what any given head of AI does varies, especially depending on the type of company. Generally, that breaks down into heads of AI at digital companies working to incorporate the technology into their products, while at nontech companies that means figuring out where and how to use existing AI technology to improve their business models. Everyone, it seems, is trying to get the rest of their company to start using AI. +
++Mike Haley, SVP of research at Autodesk, says he’s the company’s de facto head of AI, having guided the architecture and engineering software company’s AI strategy for more than a decade. In addition to steering AI usage within the company, Haley is invested in putting AI to use in Autodesk’s products in order to “dissolve the interface” between users and the software. That means AI could help people use “natural methods of expression” like English or a pencil drawing, for example, to create detailed blueprints. +
++“Suddenly this complex tool that requires all sorts of learning and parameterization becomes way more accessible to more people,” explained Haley, who has a background in computer science and applied math. +
++Bali D.R., head of AI and automation at IT services consulting firm Infosys, is helping clients leverage AI while also trying to use it to “amplify human potential” across Infosys, from recruitment to sales to software development. +
++“All parts of the value chain, we are seeing how we can actually make it better, faster, cheaper,” says D.R., who moved to the AI role from another management role, and who started his career at the company 30 years ago in software development. +
++FICO chief analytics officer Scott Zoldi has been leading the data analytics company’s AI efforts for the past seven years, also without the “buzzy” head of AI title. He’s mainly focused on incorporating AI into the company’s products, including using consumer spending patterns to help detect credit fraud or when a customer is falling for a scam. He also spends a lot of time thinking about how AI can be used responsibly so as not to run afoul of regulatory bodies, corporate governance, or consumers by, for example, using AI that’s more likely to flag a certain group of people for committing fraud. +
++Zoldi, who says he’s written more than 100 AI patents, thinks the “head of AI” position should go to someone with a technology background. +
++“You really have to be an expert or you’re potentially going to be setting up the organization for failures down the road because it’s very complicated,” Zoldi, who views the position as a sort of watchdog, like a chief of security. +
++While Gartner’s Krensky estimates about 80 percent of AI leadership comes from a tech background, another 20 percent, of course, does not. +
++That’s the case with Coca-Cola’s global head of generative AI, Pratik Thakar, who previously led the company’s global creative strategy. +
++Pratik has been using AI to streamline and amplify the company’s advertising products. That included recently using AI to make roughly 15 percent of a commercial, which sliced the production time from a year down to two months. +
++Conor Grennan, a dean at NYU’s Stern business school, who recently took on the additional title of head of generative AI, sees the title as more of an initiative and thinks of it as akin to a chief learning officer or chief productivity officer. In the position, he pushes people across NYU, from students to professors to administrators and recruiters, to use AI to become more efficient and better at their tasks. +
++Grennan, who has an MBA and had previously studied English and politics, thinks it’s actually better for many organizations if their AI leadership doesn’t come from a tech background so that the person is better able to explain its benefits to a wider audience of mere mortals. +
++“You don’t need to know the software running your iPhone, just order an Uber,” Grennan said. Instead, what’s important for the role, he says, is creativity with language and breadth. +
++“They need to be an excellent communicator, they need to have a view of the entire firm, at least at the 30,000-foot view. And also it has to be somebody who really understands what generative AI can do,” Grennan said. “You don’t capture everything by putting it in the tech department.” +
++Regardless of where the head of AI sits within an organization, the fact remains that it’s a new frontier that will likely change a lot as the technology and our understanding of it develops. And like with any new technology, there’s going to be a mix of genuine innovation and genuine swindling. +
++AI is happening, and it will be a very big deal. But its full effects — and exactly what those are — will roll out over many years, so we may have time to figure things out. +