what's up YouTube Matt Voke, callsign
Jerry, Happy Earth Day! The one day that
we're supposed to sit back and reflect
on our relationship and hopefully
symbiosis with earth how we're doing how we're
treatng our home. Have we improved our
relationship? these are some pretty big
questions and we need AI to help. The
population of Earth is about five times
what it was 100 years ago, that is crazy
right? think about how much more of an
impact these 7.8 billion
people have today on the earth, its flora,
and its fauna. We don't always think
about our impact on our surroundings
we're usually focused on other things
but this massive growth is impacting our
home planet and I don't know about you
but I'd like for this cozy blue marble
to last a couple more eons WITH humans.
Artificial Intelligence gives us the
tools to best understand our environment,
our impact on our environment, and how we
can improve our relationship with earth
itself and its plants and animals. If you
haven't watched any of my videos
explaining what AI is, and what it can do
artificial intelligence, it's basically a
set of algorithms or rules that takes in
masses of data and solves problems,
predicts things, and recommends action.
Bottom line: AI helps humans. AI doesn't
just help with these big problems it is
required to solve them. Advancements in
big data production and collection,
hardware, and powerful algorithms all set
the stage for an explosion of AI and its
ability to help us help the earth.
We don't need AI to invent some sort of
super technology but we do need it to
help us with the massive fire hose of
data that we're looking at here, how can
we improve our relationship with Mother
Earth? Well, let's talk about artificial
intelligence efforts at this in four
areas:
climate change this is a hotly debated
topic... sorry I couldn't resist... this is a
contentious topic because of the
potential implications for our future
energy use. Here are some facts: the rate
of heat trapping carbon dioxide produced
has grown, just blown through levels not
seen in the past millennia this has led
to a 1.6 degree temperature increase
since the late 19th century. This may not
seem like a lot, but Greenland alone is
losing over 250 billion tons of ice each
year, that is crazy!
Antarctica ice loss rate has tripled in
the last decade. This ice obviously is
going into the Seas which have risen 8
inches in the last century, and that rate
is doubling. Ask anybody in Miami if
rising seas are an issue...
What about AI? What can it do here to help
us? It's already helping us in optimizing
our energy demand in controlling energy
use. I covered one example of this with
DeepMind's decrease in Google's data
center cooling by 40 percent which is a
15 percent reduction in the overall
power consumption - that's a lot of carbon
dioxide that is not going into the
atmosphere. How do we scale that to
further reduce that demand? Countless
efforts throughout the world are
leveraging Google Earth's time lapse to
show us how we are changing the earth
and help us address where and when we
need to adjust our behavior. These
sequences are amazing. Other AI efforts
more selfishly are seeking at
efficiencies that can play huge
dividends for the environment as well.
Think about how beneficial it would be
to turn all of our trains, planes, and
automobiles into more environmentally
friendly electric vehicles. These, coupled
with smart cities, show great potential
decrease of carbon dioxide footprints
globally. Optimizing transportation
distribution and logistics chains is one
thing that AI is significantly better
than humans at. AI can help us predict
and distribute fresh
produce from farm-to-table. Reducing the
current 30-40% wasted
food that we are currently experiencing. 30-40% is a lot! We've got
to be able to do better, right? Next,
conservation. You've all seen the sad
commercials asking you to donate towards
panda conservation efforts. Sponsoring
one panda is important, but conservation
efforts are significantly grander than
individual animals. We need a more
holistic approach to plant and animal
interconnectivity and migration.
Conservation includes entire habitats
and biomes not just the individual flora
and fauna in them. It includes modeling
and mitigating spread of invasive
species, Disease Control, distribution of
capital, anti-poaching, and habitat
restoration. AI can help us model and
predict how animals, plants, and habitats
will react to internal and external
factors - obviously chaos theory limits
their prediction ability and the more we
know about these environments and their
interactions the better we can work
with the environment to protect these
important habitats. This is more than
planting some trees! We're talking about
entire biome harmony and preventing
habitat extinction.
Worldwide nonprofits are leveraging
cameras and other sensors to passively
detect and track wildlife movements in
difficult locations such as deserts and
rainforests. The AI run from these
pictures is able to track zebras, let's
say across Africa, just from looking at
their stripes. They're able to say in the
same way a fingerprint is which one is a
specific zebra. That's pretty cool!
There have been five mass extinctions in
the history of the earth and we have the
power to decelerate some of our harmful
behavior, and potentially prevent that
mass extinction. What about water?
Healthy oceans, rivers and streams, are also
important habitats that we need to
protect if nothing more than for selfish
reasons of assuring food and water
availability. AI helps us here
predict how illegal fishing
practices will impact fisheries, helps us
prevent and mitigate pollution, address
acidification, manages the water supply,
and plan for severe drought scenarios. AI
is already a huge part in agriculture.
Today's farms are equipped with robust
banks of sensors that monitor crop
moisture, soil composition, and
temperatures to help farmers better
monitor their crops and tailor watering
and fertilization leading to large
reductions in wasted water and pollution.
One example the Chesapeake Bay
Conservancy worked with Microsoft's AI
team in order to create high-resolution
maps of forests, farms, waterways over
64,000 square miles. Try and create a map
over one square mile, tell me how long
that takes you... now multiply that by
64,000! we need AI to help us with these
huge lifts. Finally let's take resilience:
you can look at resilience in a couple
of different ways, but it is basically
preparing humans, plants, animals, and
the earth to get knocked down and get
back up afterwards and continue thriving
AI is helping us model, predict, and
forecast disasters, droughts, and
hazardous weather. You've seen the great
spaghetti predictions of hurricanes
inbound to your location before and the
associated cones, but these tools have
significantly improved in the past
decade. AI is able to more accurately
model how these chaotic systems will
react to temperature and pressure
changes than ever before, and by
aggregating these models together we get
a decently accurate prediction so that
we can better prepare for these
disasters before it occurs. After a disaster
occurs
AI is able to aggregate open source and
private information to model the efforts
and help us prioritize response through
coordinated emergency relief and
response efforts in areas such as Yemen.
AI is helping scientists understand
water shortage, drought, and famine that's enough
following these efforts designed to
protect the earth also protect us. Our
mutual success and challenges are
obviously tied together. You don't need
to want to help the environment
altruistically to see the benefits here.
You can still see the return on your
investment personally, and for Humanity.
The future is bright! and we have to make
sure that we treat other humans, the
flora, the fauna, and the earth like we
hope it will be around for another
couple billion years. Artificial
Intelligence is giving us the tools to
more accurately understand both our
environment and the effects that we're
producing on our environment. So much is possible by taking the tools we have
today and applying them to better our
human experience, and the world. It
doesn't have to be in either/or. This
Earth Day, as you think about humans,
plants, and animals, all enjoying this
planet together, think about what AI is
doing, other areas we can leverage it to
help our relationship with the earth
going forward. Now for the PSA Section: if you feel like you want to help, don't
look at giving money to someone... that
shouldn't be your first step. Go online,
sign up for electronic statements,
replace the traditional light bulbs in
your house with more energy efficient
longer-lasting LEDs, reduce gasoline
air-conditioning and excessive energy
use, recycle products - that goes without
saying,
ride your bike or walk if you're only
gonna be going a mile,
don't drink bottled water! Grow a garden
in your yard, don't plant acres of grass
that require high levels of water and
fertilizer to maintain. Go outside every
once in a while, go on a hike, experience
the beauty of nature that we too
frequently don't have time for, help
teach the future generations about how
awesome the earth, science, plants, and
animals are by going on nature walks.
That's my favorite thing to do with my
family.
Smash the thumbs up! and subscribe if you
want to see more AI as I put out these
videos... Thanks for watching the video
hopefully you find AI as fascinating as
I do and can now see some of the great
ways it's able to improve
the tight relationship we have with
Earth. Happy Earth Day! and remember,
keep learning! This is Jerry, Seeya!
 
