Internet DNA Podcast

Smart buildings, electric cars, renewable energy, it's all there so is it technology or the messaging and our habits that need to change? Technology in theory can help us clean up the mess we have made and prevent us from doing it again; but what about in practice? Which government will actually commit to saving our long term future over their short term goals - it seems a simple answer so why is no one doing it? Enter Greta Thunberg.

Or maybe the actual best solution to climate change is removing humans altogether... and perhaps farty cows - if we tasked an AI with solving climate change, would this be it's solution?

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

This week, this week we're going to discuss technology and its role in climate change. No small topic. It's what?

It's on the tip of everybody's tongue, not least because of the amazing teenager aggressive than Berg. I give talks in schools to children about the different jobs in tech. I think we've discussed it before. My top tech chumps and one of the things I talk about is data scientists and with all this data, how this job is so imperative, I'm going to get more so in the future that if we have people that are able to read these vast amounts of data, then they can see patterns and start to answer questions, give solutions and predictions. So therefore the more data we collect, the more answers we should be able to also collect to help do the right things to reverse the climate change crisis we're in. But there's two things, isn't there? Because technology is also adding to this climate change issue we have. And also is it just the data that's gonna help us or is it every side of technology that can help us reduce our emissions live better? Not the story of the planet.

So I think the data can allow us to understand how and why it's happening. From there, you can start to develop policies that help people to be less destructive. Also, technology provides the idea of perhaps reversing and cleaning up some of this. In the Pacific there's a thing called the central Pacific gyre, which is where all this plastic lives and there are people who are designing ships that go out to recollect that plastic and recycle it and turn it back into plastic rather than it floating around in the sea. So there are technological solutions and probably some of this is in the round carbon sequestering. Recapturing the carbon out of the atmosphere and turning it back into the carbon that we would like to use. Recycling technologies, extraction technologies, and also even simple things like designing buildings things in a much more economic way so that there's not so much waste. So there's a lot of technology that can be put towards the environment in which we live.

So and well areas. Can we use technology to correct things? You talked about buildings and this comes back a little bit to last week and who should create the rules and the ethics building. This can be built in such a way that they are so economical with energy and then the smart buildings, the building knows what temperature it needs to heat to. It knows about the lights, what level they need to be and it will change the heating, the lighting, the air conditioning, the environment. I think it can even move furniture and things around to ergonomically suit the people, but also in doing so make the best use of minimal energy.

The papers are

all just carbon neutral. They're actually called the negatives and the energy we use. Every new house that is built instead of being built to the cheapest budget should be built to the budget that's going to have the best energy efficient life so developers shouldn't be looking at, Oh, I can get this, I can cut the costs here and get this built really cheaply, and then it's expensive to heat and run because of the short cuts taken in the bills. It should be regulated that it must be a very, very low cost to run, which may be a slightly larger setup cost, but that has that effect and I think we can go through every aspect of our lives currently we can look at cars,

but then you're going to get into an issue which is you're going to price people out in the market. What you need to be able to do is to say we need some housing that people can just afford that we understand may not be the best we can possibly build, but we will offset that when we build the more expensive houses. They will be super brilliant.

Either we're trying to save the world or not and if a house is built to a better spec to me that the running costs are cheaper.

Yeah, it's about changing habits. How do you stop people from driving four by fours when they don't need to? When the is the moment it's in our culture that that's a prestige vehicle. If you could change that. And then it was seen as, I mean I'm a member comedian once and if you could get them renamed as Pino vans, no one would drive them. So what he's doing is making a point, which is it's a status thing. There's no logic. The logical choice would be to go for a super efficient small car. A lot of this we're talking about how technology does it, but actually the real technology in that is messaging and changing people's attitudes towards things. And that's quite difficult. I think you'll find Google and Facebook can alter what you see. They do tailor what you see, but it's a much slower change.

But what about office blocks?

But this is the big argument and I totally agree with you, which is what we shouldn't be doing is banging up houses that are clearly not in any way positive to humanity. They should be built with their long term footprint in mind so that you make it economically the choice that you would make. So if you put a tax on diesel cars because that polluting, you don't have to regulate. People just don't do it anymore because it's more expensive and unfortunately that is the way that people move around. The other side of that is you need to deal with how, why people buy things, whether they're buying them for prestige, which is, let's face it, in the Western world especially that is how consumerism work. You take the same product and you stamp out and saw all different ways and you sell a high end version and a low end version. What you need to make sure is that the low end version is not disastrous for the environment. Oh, it was a human race in general because it's not costless solar panels aren't costless. It's not like saying the panels are all good, there's a certain amount of resources gets into making them into producing them, into shipping them. There's no way of doing it, so you need to optimize it. I'm sure we can do it already. It's just making it cost effective that it's actually something that people will buy and people will make.

And so what is technology as well and in time it changed then? Is it a negative role or is it a positive role

in time? It will be positive said this, you know, technology in itself is neither good nor bad. It's how one uses it. If we all got into get to a solution with some planet and climate and ecology, it will be driven out of technology, especially in and around machine learning, AI really understanding what are the key contributors and how do we stop them from being that you know, and maybe it becomes a driverless world and actually then you can massively optimize, do you need petrol engines anymore? We'll go electric. Can we optimize electric production so that we only produce exactly the amount of energy that we need and we produce it in the least damaging way possible. Do we do when than tied and so we need to understand that combustion engines will seem not very far away, will seem like a very old technology. A bit like we look at horsepower, we'll steam power. It's a brief moment in time when they have their moments.

If we stopped technology, just try that tomorrow. No, no technology allowed. Yeah. Would we be making a massive inroad to delaying climate change? Hit out airplanes just in that as well while we're at it back to the middle ages. Back to the warehouse full of data's. No. Cloud cloud storage is a massive no medicines, no hospitals. One, no technology.

Yeah. Okay, so they can use a knife in the thing but we were not going to be able

nice and I and a full

is and that's where we are. That's technology

but at least the planet would keep going.

Well is the question which is one of the really interesting things when you look at the future and where technology is going. Actually if we optimize for the planet, getting rid of humans might be a really good plan. That's not a great plan to the human race

and that's what we're worried the AI would.

It's a thing that if you get AOI way, if you told it that its mission. Yeah. That it may decide actually one of the best ways to solve climate change is to get rid of the bloody humans

and it would be right. Yeah, it would be right. It might follow them home with cows. But anyway, the cows would go anyway if the humans weren't eating them.

Well actually [inaudible] as a site there or book where people arrive on this planet and it is just a machine maintaining a planet. But for no one cause everyone's dead. It's killed everyone on its way to creating this perfect planet, generating this wonderful world that no one can live in. But wonderful, wonderful to no one. It's the no way, man. Nobody,

I wonder what a machine would think was beautiful. I mean I imagine, you know, rolling Hills, cherry blossom, uh, flowing rivers. What does a machine thing?

Well, they were probably just thinking about what is the optimal situation where the temperature fluctuation isn't very grave. Seasons happen, but the water is clean, the air is clean, the soil is in red box or who, and for what? That's sort of the idea of the book you get to this planet where it had all been solved by AI, but unfortunately on its way to solving all the problems is actually removes the main component.

So we've answered our question in technology's role in climate and changes just to wipe out the human race. We need to be careful,

but when we tell it that that's what we want.

We've got to put a little caveat in please. So climate change,

I think if you've got rid of technology tomorrow, you would go through a huge extinction.

Do you think we would go through an extension way?

I'm not a complete and utter extinction. I can't imagine Europeans being able to live without any technology at all. I think we've died. The internet delivers your food, it makes your trains run on time. It does everything that new thing happens. It just does it automatically and it optimizes it. And what you get is this huge inefficiency. I think it would be worse. I don't think data centers, I know people like to live on about them, but I don't think that they're the biggest problem in the world. They could be better designed. The hate that they produce can then be used to generate the energy that they then use to power themselves. We could build them maybe in places where there's GSM. It powers. There are solutions to data centers. I don't think getting rid of computers is the answer.

So when [inaudible] goes to the senators in the stage, your ruining our lives, you are destroying the future, what are you going to do about it? What are they going to do about? It

was very impulsive in what she said, which is you have to make pilot decision and by not making them you are betraying the future of this species because we have to make some hard decisions. We have to decide this is economically difficult, but it is for the long term of the planet is absolutely vital and that's her point, which is you can't keep chasing the money all the time.

Well at the beginning of this podcast you said, well they can't create all houses more environmentally sound cause people can't afford them and now we're just saying you've got to make some hard choices either we really need to work to change the carbon and every other output we are doing that is destroying our planet. All we do at halfheartedly, which isn't going to work and we need to get global government in place so that everybody does it. That's the other problem.

Yeah. It's not a binary decision. It's not like we do nothing or we do everything.

I think it is actually,

it may be approaching that point

because they'll always be late, so if we don't try and do it 100% and maybe manage 70 if we only try and do it right, 60% we will probably only manage 30 well, 20 counts rockets, all

of Europe is going to do everything to be ops most ecological position.

Yeah, and hopefully by trying to do this, I know it costs a lot of money, but it should also create a lot of jobs and perhaps in itself, stop creating an industry that can make money from being green,

but you're going to go out competed by places like Japan and places like America who are not going to do that. Run the risk of collapsing your economy in order to get there. Now. I agree also that once you're there, once you've got to that point, you will then be in a massively advantageous position because you will be so much more involved. A bit like when we had the steam engine, it gave us that advantage and I do agree but I think that politicians are too short term to worry about that. It will be good in 30 years. They don't care what it's like in 40 years. And I think that was one of the points. You're betraying the future by not making decisions. Now the issue is if you try and make it global, there's always someone who doesn't want to do it and so you have to start off on your own and you don't want to be the only place doing it. So it's getting that agreement and I think she made a very valid point, which is we can keep cow tiling to companies for the rest of our lives. We'll all get shocked at him. Know

does the lobbyists that keep the things that they want going going well, it sounding more like a doom and gloom podcast that we often do. What you are saying is that governments thank game chicken, I'm not going to save the world cause they're not going to save the world. Well I'm not going to say as well cause then I'm going to say as well so no one is

and historically Europe is better at trying to do something. We probably won't be in Europe anymore but I think they have an opportunity to set a standard and to say we've done it, we've survived it. This is what we're doing. And then you can say and we're going to tax anything that comes in that is not reduced to this standard.

Yeah it does make me cross that you can buy things in the supermarket that are not recyclable. That should be a law. You can only make packaging that is recyclable.

And the way to do that is to say you have to pay for the recycle. When you say to the supermarket, you buy anything in non recyclable packaging, you pay tax on it. So plastic bottles become more expensive than glass boxes. For example. Plastic bags become more expensive than that because to be honest, that's all businesses care about [inaudible] ESG and impact studies, they don't really care and they will see these as incursions on their profit margin, but in the long term it's got to be positive that in 50 years we can still buy that stuff rather than all being that, I think that's the way to do it, but I don't think you're going to get that kind of work done in a country like England or in a country like America, which has gotten much more free market economy consumerist view. I think you're going to have to come out in a place like Europe where people have a more socialist bent on their outlet. It doesn't need to happen. I'm just worried because China and the U S are so not interested in it

in Finland and completely renewable energy.

Oh, Iceland can do it because they've got a lot of GFR, mill energy. They've got a lot of hydro, they've got a lot of title, so they really can do it. There's an argument in that title, right? Got wind right, got solar right. Then the UK could get pretty much there. There is always going to be space for nuclear. People don't like it, but actually from an ecological point of view, it's quite low. In part you have the storage and radioactivity materials, but we may find that that's something that we can use again and again and again. Maybe they become a reusable results.

I live very close to new. You can pass stations. When I think about it too hard, it does make me worry. I think your point, it's better that I'm completely destroyed and the people further away, they're only partially destroyed.

Really. The big problem with them. For you, if you think about it, would you rather have a massive coal fired power station seven miles away, belching black smoke all over you every day? It's that against the one in a million chance that it will blow up,

which is not one in a million. It has happened. It happened in Russia.

Yeah. You understand why it happened and it almost happened in three mile Island, but Hey, that was very early on be the Russians. That was a very, very peculiar set of circumstances. Chernobyl, they were putting it through a test space. It hadn't eaten off. It wasn't like someone left a button on and it all blew up. It was a sequence of design choices and operating processes and specific circumstances that happen that three mile Island was much the same. I had people who were used to much more than nuclear power stations based on submarines where when you switch them off, they went to an incredibly low power state. Whereas in power stations, when you switch them off, they still producing a vast amount of power. I watch a lot of programs on disasters, not because of the disaster, but it's really interesting to understand no one makes the wrong decision. No one's sitting there maliciously making the wrong decision. They're all doing what they think is best and it's interesting to understand what kind of processes lead people down ever cascading problems

on a slow burning disaster. Once morale goes down in the company because of cuts or whatever it is, people stop wanting to do that job so they just don't care. And actually some people actively try and sabotage that jobs because they're so unhappy there. And that has been brought on by maybe their pension has been taken away or there's been cuts in salary or they feel they can't get anywhere cause there's too much management and not enough workers or they realize that what they're trying to do is futile. So they stop caring and once to stop caring their mistake, stop being made, arguing in amongst teams and they're not working together. And then all these mistakes happen and it's this exponential downward direction.

Oh, that overworked and under-trained. I experienced this every day on the trains and you get bits of it in the NHS and we just don't have the money to do the things that we know we should be doing. You can see how companies very quickly from a moral state, it's easy to lose pride in where you work and what you do.

So to go back to a podcast title, what is technology's role in climate change?

It's role is to save us all from ourselves

and how is it going to do that?

It's going to do it until you raise. Like I said at the beginning of the podcast, Hey, we're going to develop technologies that help to clean up the mess we've already made and the other side of that is we will develop technologies and models and understanding of the processes that are going on to help us stop doing it more in the future. Whether that's through efficiencies, understanding systems or you can offset doing this. That is where roles are. Things like machine learning and AI are going to be really, really important when you said data scientists, but I actually think a huge amount of this work is going to be done by computers. They can understand patterns, so very, very deep learning. They can learn things that you don't tell them. They can start learning much like a toddler does. They have the potential to save us potentially to kill us as well.

I feel that we're coming out of the age of where we've been enslaved by technology and into the age where it should be freeing up our time, and I hope therefore the time that it starts to help us free up planets as well, and that it keeps them, not just us living, but the planet living as well.

Yeah, the other old times, so there's obviously that we become machines

so we can live in a mad max type climate, but as we are machines, it doesn't really matter anyway. Oh, we're all sitting in pods and living in our lovely virtual worlds sort of things. It doesn't NASA that there is nothing. We're in a dome to stop us being destroyed by the atmosphere, but apart from that, we're not really on the planet at all. Yeah. Great. Yeah, I'm glad we still set that up

and so we've got time before that point. Speaking to you next week.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.