5x AI in the fight against climate change

More and more companies are seeing artificial intelligence, or AI, as a tool to meet their sustainable goals. Whether in the construction, consulting or food industries, everywhere AI seems to be able to support organizations to cope with climate change. An overview of some recent initiatives.

Wood cutting

Start-up Maestro wants to process trees into building materials more efficiently. By analyzing each felled tree using AI, company can reduce wood waste in cross-layer lumber production by 30 percent. The technology is able to analyze felled trees and determine how to saw them most efficiently. The result: a set of boards that are far from straight and even. But AI offers a solution to that, too. Namely, the technology is able to determine how the uneven planks fit together like puzzle pieces.

Battery Building

Battery manufacturers need to look for alternative materials to lithium. Because although lithium has proven to be a valuable raw material in batteries, supplies are running out and mining has a major environmental impact. That's why a team of scientists from Microsoft called on the help of AI in their search for a new kind of battery. Based on suggestions given by AI, the scientists then tested and developed a working battery with 70 percent less lithium than similar designs. This process, which usually takes years, now succeeded within a few months.

Making food

Developing vegetarian burgers, sausages and fish is not easy. The taste, the color, the smell, the texture, the price: everything has to be right. As a result, the development process takes a long time. Achieving the desired texture especially a process of lots of trying. This inefficient method of trial and error can be abandoned when AI starts predicting the texture of ingredients and products. And that is exactly what is happening in the new project GreenProtein AI.

Convincing climate skeptics

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now found a new AI skill that could help bring climate skeptics and science closer together. The AI-powered large language model GPT-3 - one of the forerunners of the popular ChatGPT - managed to strike a tone in chat conversations with climate skeptics such that people subsequently became more sympathetic to the science emphasizing man's role in climate change.

Visualizing ecosystems

Milan Meyberg, founder of Emissary of GAIA goes one step further than a chat conversation. He wants to literally give various ecosystems a face and a voice. Meyberg: "You can train a program like ChatGPT on all kinds of sources. For example, if you want to create an AI for the Amazon, you can feed it with scientific articles, reports, books and satellite images about the area. Then, people, organizations, businesses and governments can ask questions of these programs, communicating with them. The ecosystems are visualized as avatars. In this way, there can be interaction just as people are used to among themselves."

Source: change.inc