Notes from #WebSummit: Hacking the future of our planet

Empower every person, organization and species on the planet to thrive in a resource-constrained world.

Details
Date: November 7, 2017
Time: 10:30
Conference stream: Planet: tech

Speakers
Robert Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist, Microsoft, LinkedIn

Web Summit Summary
Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist will discuss how data is integral to the future of our planet, from informing smart policy action to reduce carbon to creating new tools to reduce emissions and increase energy. In this session, he’ll explain the intersection of the age of AI and age of Anthropocene, discuss how advanced technologies are already playing a role in enabling sustainable transformations of nearly every sector, and how developers can join efforts with companies like Microsoft to hack the future.

Main Theme

We’re currently experiencing an overlap between rapid strain on natural resources, and rapid growth in the development of artificial intelligence. How can we we leverage AI to make impactful change on our resource scarce planet?

The Key Quote

“While there are many strained resources — the one there is an abundance of is human ingenuity. We have the ability to impact great change.”
 — Robert Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist, Microsoft

Key Points

Robert and his team are part of an initiative at Microsoft called AI for Earth. They focus on increasing access to resources, education, and innovation in order to affect agriculture, water, biodiversity, and climate change.

1. Shift your model on rate of change. Many people measure impact in incremental units (10%) when discussing climate change, resource scarcity, etc. The earth doesn’t have enough time for a rate of change that slow. We need to start thinking in rapid, compounding rates of change (10x).
2. Make AI do the work for you. There’s some things that humans are capable of doing inately fast — like assessing satellite imagery of the earth. Traditional image recognition techniques can’t compete with us here — but AI can. We need to find more opportunities to teach AI to do things like this for us. Further reading: AI for Land Cover Data.
3. Consider the environments we’re looking to extend with technology. For example — how can we create a connected farm, when they’re often located remotely? What does that mean for how we transfer and store large amounts of data in these locations? Further reading: closing the broadband gap with TV whitespaces.
4. Adapt existing practices with modern technologies. When we’re looking for opportunities to improve existing practices — look for practices that have been unchanged for many years. Further reading: Project Premonition.
5. So, where do we go next? We need to reinvent the rate at which we consume resources — we need to preserve our declining resources, and we need to so with innovation at scale.

Reflections

It’s often said that technology can save the world. With the work the team at AI for Earth is doing, perhaps technology will save the world.

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