Cleantech & Fintech
As increasingly more scientists are warning about climate change and the climate effect on people’s lives, there is a consistent engineering effort into reducing anthropogenic climate change primarily by reducing the greenhouse gases our industries in our lifestyles produce.
This article aims to describe what cleantech (clean technology) is and how it relates to fintech (financial technology). The people’s understanding of these terms primarily come from articles, audio or video published on the internet or aired on TV. We will discover how people document themselves with regards to clean tech and fintech, around the world.
The difference between Cleantech and Fintech in terms of search interests is very high (in favour of Fintech)
Cleantech (clean technology) = stands for technology that aims to reduce the negative effects of industry on the environment. In the financial world, cleantech investors aim to “profit from a technology that increases performance, productivity and efficiency by minimising the effects on the environment” (Investopedia — https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cleantech.asp).
Fintech (financial technology) = aims to use technology in the field of financial services as a competitor to traditional means and methods used in the financial sector.
Today’s micro-trends show a great disparity between cleantech and fintech in favour of fintech. Reasons being that financial technologies are very well represented in Media both online and on TV. Cleantech however is still a niche term. Online, cleantech is deeply associated with the current climate change studies and it is related to a solution for reducing global warming factors produced by humans.
It seems to be consistent with an even greater disparity looking back from December 2018 until today. Fintech is clearly the winner, maybe not only because of the greater media coverage but also because it promises an entrance to the financial industry for companies and specialists who provide IT services. IT experts are exponentially growing in numbers as our society becomes more and more dependent on technology.
On the other side, cleantech is seen as niche technology and to date there are no massive breakthroughs or return on investment for such technologies. Consequently the media coverage is farm or reduced then the one of fintech. This results in a much lower interest manifested by people went searching the Web for the term cleantech.
In the past 30 days worldwide fintech kept its dominance. Below, the world map represents people internet searches on topics associated with fintech or cleantech. Larger more orange dots mark a high difference between fintech and cleantech, smaller bluish dots show where the search difference between the topics is low.
Some sample distributions below.
Cleantech & Fintech explore increasingly the adoption of AI in their service offerings and operations.
Fintech adopts artificial intelligence primarily in software solutions. These software solutions are capable of understanding optimum opportunities for investment or optimum opportunities for selling assets or equity. For example high frequency trading is a very successful application of such artificial intelligence.
Cleantech however applies artificial intelligence more frequently in hardware than in software. You can imagine an agricultural use case where an autonomous harvesting machine powered by an electric engine can, alone or synchronised with other such machines, collect the crops in large fields. This task requires not only automation but also decision making. Of course the “intelligence” resides in the software that operates the autonomous machine, but from the outside, the manifestation of this technology can be considered hardware. There are also applications like drones distributing seeds, or aquatic drones collecting plastic waste from oceans or seas.
For industry, AI currently means as ‘Automation Intelligence’
As explained above, there are multiple manifestations of AI in both cleantech and fintech. The common denominator seems to be alternating the low-level decision making. It is a philosophical debate to establish the borders between automated intelligence and artificial intelligence based on the various definitions and understandings of the word “intelligence”. Arguably, most applications of AI in industry target automation intelligence. This is to say that if a task requires a minimum amount of training and the number of decisions needed to complete the task is minimal and repetitive, the process of taking these decisions can be automated. Nevertheless decision taking falls well within the realm of intelligence, therefore it is my belief that today’s applications of AI target automation intelligence.
Please comment below your opinion.
How it’s made
This article was written with the help of the trendy dots research platform (illustrated below). The data set comes from Google Trends and the additional research was done through internet searches. At this point, the trendy dots research platform interfaces open data sources and facilitates its user a fast start in answering questions with data. It allows the user to plan a data driven article about the chosen topic.
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