Robert Downey Jr. Announces Footprint Coalition to Clean Up the World With Advanced Tech

Robert Downey Jr. used his part of the opening keynote for Amazon's Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas Tuesday evening to announce the launch of a new organization that is committed to using advanced technologies for the good of the environment. The Footprint Coalition, as the group is called, is scheduled to officially launch by April of 2020. "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. They're like Wikipedia with character defects," he joked during his talk. The announcement came at the end of a 20-plus minute freewheeling talk about artificial intelligence, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Downey Jr.'s own career and the evolution of his Tony Stark character, which featured cameos from Amazon's AI assistant Alexa as well as Matt Damon, who joined via video.