Artificially Intelligent Solutions

As pretty-obviously flawed logic permeates a powerfully anti-scientific ethos within the Trump administration, some pretty strange “justifications” for denigrating environmental priorities seep out. Toxic industrial effluents are now permitted by the Environmental Protection Agency to be dumped into public waterways. Folks complaining about polluted water coming out of their taps are simply reassured that there is nothing to worry about. Ironically, one of the most recent examples comes out of the deepest, reddest section of Trump MAGA country, Martin County, Kentucky.

When there is water, and the water supply to residences in this rather poor area (even for Kentucky) is anything but constant and predictable, it is often murky and discolored, mostly folks believe, from broken pipes and failed infrastructure. Foul and toxic. “In the last month, tension in Martin County ramped up after the water district shut off flow to more than a thousand residents for days because an intake pump and service pipes froze during severely cold weather.

“As residents in this sparsely populated pocket of Appalachia struggled — some boiling rainwater to bathe and melting snow to flush toilets — local schools canceled classes for three days and volunteers fanned out to deliver bottled water to the sick and elderly… County officials declared a state of emergency and sought permission from the state to raise water rates by 49%.

“‘People here are just enraged they're being asked to pay more for water that they can't drink — for water that's only suitable for flushing commodes,’ said Gary Ball, a 64-year-old former coal miner and editor of the Mountain Citizen, a weekly newspaper that has doggedly chronicled the water district's water violations, pump failures, and unsanitary conditions over the last two decades. ‘It's nasty, nasty water.’

“Local officials have sought to reassure residents the water is drinkable and that discoloration is not necessarily a sign it is unsafe: cloudiness, for example, can occur when air becomes trapped in water, and does not typically affect water safety.” Los Angeles Times, February 12th.

“Not necessarily”?! Indeed, the notion that bad air, bad water and global climate change are good for us is an increasingly common response from local GOP-dominated governments and quite naturally the Trump administration itself.

“Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has suggested that global warming may be beneficial to humans, in his latest departure from mainstream climate science.,, Pruitt, who has previously erred by denying that carbon dioxide is a key driver of climate change, has again caused consternation among scientists by suggesting that warming temperatures could benefit civilization.

“The EPA administrator said that humans are contributing to climate ‘to a certain degree,’ but added: ‘We know humans have most flourished during times of warming trends. There are assumptions made that because the climate is warming that necessarily is a bad thing… Do we know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100 or year 2018?’ he told a TV station in Nevada. ‘It’s fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.’” The Guardian (UK), February 7th.

No Scott, it’s called “science” and “computer modeling,” but perhaps that very scientific world you know so little about just might provide the best “fixes” to undo the damage you and your greedy cronies, catering to a base that thinks religion and science are at war, are perpetrating against the American people… and the world. Yes, Scott, the same programs that allow your local weather-caster to make a daily report. Well beyond the climate change modeling that is improving by the day, Ben Schiller, writing for the February 12th FastCompany.com, offers us this ray of hope: “A report released during the recent Davos World Economic Forum meeting laid more than 80 potential environmental applications for AI, ranging from the mundane to the futuristic…

“If the world’s natural resources are increasingly stressed and depleted, the silver lining may be that we’re becoming better equipped at tracking that destruction and potentially doing something about it. Cheap, widespread sensor networks, the internet of things, magnitude-improvements in computing power, open source algorithms–these all allow us to manage oceans and forests more effectively, if we want the opportunity. Artificial intelligence systems that can sense, think, learn, and act on their own could allow a major upgrade in conservation efforts, in dealing with climate change, and living in a more energy-efficient manner…

“‘Problems like illegal logging and illegal fishing require better monitoring systems. Data from satellites and unmanned underwater vessels can help bring greater visibility to such resources, but AI can help crunch the data to make it useful. New processing capabilities could provide close-to-real-time transparency by enabling authorities, and even the general public, to monitor fishing, shipping, ocean mining, and other activities,’ the report says. ‘Vessel algorithmic patterns could identify illegal fishing, biological sensors could monitor the health of coral reefs, and ocean current patterns could improve weather forecasting.’ Solar, wind, and other renewables have the advantage of being carbon-free and ubiquitous. They can be situated in villages and towns and out-of-the-way places, bringing energy closer to everyone who needs it. The challenge is stitching these disparate sources together into a coherent, functional whole. That’s where autonomous systems come in. They can deal with the intermittency of renewables and react to the ebb and flow: when one source of power is coming online or going down, or when one user is ramping up demand and another is clocking off for the night. AI systems are flexible and they can do more work, and be in more places, than human grid managers…

“Decision-making in the wake of natural disasters is limited by the information available to government agencies and aid groups. It’s hampered by a lack of coordination. Losses of life and property are multiplied when first responders can’t prioritize and target resources. [Celine Herweijer, a partner at consultants PwC and one of the authors of the Davos-issued report] sees a role for automated systems that can analyze real-time data, like social media. ‘We don’t have a data-smart way of responding in real time to natural disasters,’ she says. ‘We need public-private partnerships that bring together humanitarian agencies and big satellite companies to pinpoint where to start,’ she says…

[The complexity of naturally-occurring data has defied analysis until now.] The natural world contains reservoirs of innovative capacity that remain largely untapped. AI and systems analytics can help unbundle the biological and biomimetic possibilities. Scientists have begun work on the natural world equivalent of the Human Genome Project, with the aim of mapping the DNA sequences of all living things. The Amazon Third Way initiative, for instance, is developing a project called the Earth Bank of Codes, with two main intents. One, to open up potential discoveries, like blood pressure medicine derived from viper venom. And, two, to record the provenance of biological IP assets, so local people can benefit from follow-on discoveries.

“‘It’s not only about mapping genetic codes, but also how you change decisions around those codes. Tracking assets may be useful for a pharmaceutical company, but you are also starting to make sure that when a transaction happens, the value goes back to the community that grew the species,’ says Herweijer.” So you see, Scott, there actually people smart enough to understand what clearly eludes your mental grasp.

And “no” Harvard summa cum laude graduate, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, those same complex computer analytics that identify and propose neutral solutions to gerrymandering are not “sociological gobbledygook,” which you say are incapable for you to understand, are even more accurate. “In an era when ‘facts are often dismissed as ‘fake news,’ we are particularly concerned about a person of your stature suggesting to the public that scientific measurement is not valid or reliable and that expertise should not be trusted,’ Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, president of the [American Sociological Association] and a professor of sociology at Duke University, wrote to Roberts in an open letter. ‘What you call ‘gobbledygook’ is rigorous and empirical.’” Inside Higher Ed, October 12th. Seriously, how do you make coherent policy based merely on feelings and mythology that continuously reject measurable facts?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are now able to be so much more accurate with scientific information based on the advances in artificial intelligence and mathematics, but it comes as no surprise that a Trump-MAGA ethos that wants to push us back to the 1950s is equally committed to the level of science and math of well over half a century ago.