Why Artificial Intelligence is Key to Fight Climate Change
The Mayans were a highly advanced civilization. Having a deep relationship with their world and nature. They had sophisticated irrigation systems and advanced agriculture and a complex, deeply knowledgeable society and culture. In many ways, smarter at living in tune with their environment. They built numerous cities and even figured out complex agricultural management on steep mountainsides. They were a growing empire. Until they weren’t. While we don’t know the exact reason for their collapse as a civilization, scholars believe drought played a significant role. Along with overpopulation and warfare. The evidence of environmental degradation is strong. So what does this have to do with AI?
Complexity. Primarily, the inability to manage the complexity of their society and deal with decades long extensive drought. While they built increasingly sophisticated irrigation systems to bring in water from remote places, they couldn’t keep up with the complexity. Human brains can only process so much and deal with so much complexity. This remains true of human’s today. We just haven’t evolved our cognitive abilities to the point of being able to deal with such complexity. Now, as we face global climate change and we’ve come to understand the world is far more complex and integrated than we ever understood before, we are again realizing our organic processors in our brains, despite being magnificent complex systems themselves, have likely reached a cognitive limit for understanding and dealing with certain complex issues. This is where Artificial Intelligence comes into play.
Ai can extend our ability to think about and deal with a complex issue like climate change, by augmenting our own cognitive abilities. Already, significant amounts of computing time and data collection have been used to shape climate models and we are constantly collecting more data. For AI to work well, it needs a lot of data. As in way more data than we can really comprehend ourselves. You may ask Siri to play a song, but behind that simple request there is tons of data.
In my prior post about Digital Twins, I referenced how this is helping the shipbuilding industry build ships faster, but also greener. California startup OneConcern is building a Digital Twin of our planet, largely to manage risk, because they need to make money and that’s good, but the data they collect and the AI they use, will help manage climate change and could deliver key insights to influence legislation and help companies take truly valuable steps to help our planet. Other companies like Pachama are using aerial surveillance with AI to monitor large patches of forests.
We will need many more of these types of companies and investments by governments along with sharing of data amongst scientific institutions, companies and governments to get where we need to go with AI to fight this epic battle of our own making.
The Mayans had no way to augment their brains. We do. And while AI alone won’t solve the problem, it may be able to handle levels of complexity and complex systems that even our smartest brains around the world can’t. It is but one tool we can use along with others, but it may be the most important tool for dealing with complexity.
We will also have to address the amount of energy AI uses and the energy hungry data centres. We must also address gender and racial bias in AI as that could negatively impact potential climate change solutions in different parts of the world.
