Google Article
As I was reading around about AI and data science, I found this article that caught my eye. It was put together by Google and details the ways that Google is using AI to fight a number of social problems in many different areas of life with AI. You can access it here. The article covers issues from the underrepresentation of languages online to healthcare to the empowerment of creators and artists with AI. But the section in the article that really caught my attention was the section where Google elaborates on their efforts to use AI to help address climate change.
In that section, they talk about 2 major natural disasters in which Google is using AI to track and help minimize the effects of– wildfires and floods. In wildfire tracking, their more recent development, they are using their technology to give a live feed on Google Search and Maps and to inform firefighters of the fires. This system is already out in the US, Canada, and Mexico and it is being rolled out in parts of Australia. For floods, Google has Google FloodHub where they help communities to predict when and where the floods will happen and how deep they will be giving the people affected the time to take the necessary precautions to keep themselves and their community safe through the flood.
My Take
When I saw this, I was fascinated. It’s amazing to me how AI can basically predict the future. Think about it, if you give a machine some satellite images, and sit with it for a bit to train the program, it can tell you when and where the flood will happen as well as how deep the flood will be. The impact of this technology is unimaginable, in 2021 Google’s FloodHub has “sent 115 million flood notifications to 23 million people over Google Search and Maps, helping save countless lives “(Google article). Just like the first post, I will compare the technology of today with a fictional character because it still feels like the things these models are accomplishing can only happen in fiction. It doesn’t feel real that we can say to the foot how deep a flood that isn’t even here yet.
AI is like a genie minus all the negatives. There are no limits on the number of wishes, you don’t have to keep track of a lamp, and there are no limits on what you can wish for – if you can train the AI it will do it for you. The future feels more like our imaginations: whatever we wish for we can will it into life with all of this new technology becoming so readily available and the knowledge for how to use it arguably just as available.
Conclusion
All in all, it is unbelievable that we can detect when a wildfire will happen, or when a flood will happen before it does, and send out messages to people around the world to seek shelter saving countless lives all because of technology. The ways that AI is being used right now are incredible and the only thing limiting how it is used is the number of problems that we face in the world today. I am ecstatic to see more applications of AI that make breakthroughs in the way we all live our lives and I hope you are just as excited as I am!