Digitainability is a bit of an odd term. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. So what is it? It’s the idea of using our digital technology to get to a more sustainable economy. We talked a lot about that last time without explicitly using the term. It will involve making use of our ability to collect and analyze data in order to identify places where we can be more efficient, to recycle more, places where policy can be refined to help promote greater sustainability.
One of the key uses of AI will be in working in phases to get from where we are now to where we want to be. Imagine a giant ocean liner trying to make a turn. It doesn’t exactly happen on a dime. Trying to force that ship to turn too tightly risks literally breaking the ship apart and killing everyone aboard. The global, or even your local economic system isn’t terribly different. Trying to change everything all at once will cause massive damage that will do far more harm than good. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to change. Too often, the fact that changing too much too fast is risky has too often been used as an excuse for not changing at all. So, change we must, but without losing sight of the fact that we have to be careful with how we do it. Business as usual may not be able to continue but business completely upended won’t help much either.
One way that AI would be of immense help is if we could take all the information we have about how certain changes have affected an area over a certain period of time. That can provide a lot of data for an AI to process in order to determine the effect similar changes will have in a given area. What’s even better is if the people working on such a problem made use of TARTLE and our resources in order to do this. By making use of our data marketplace, they can get real time data from people who are being directly affected by policy changes as they happen. That can then lead to near real time refinements on the ground as well as improving the model with better data. This can lead to determining how best to transition to a sustainable economy in a way that won’t completely upset the apple cart.
There is a strong and growing demand for this kind of shift. You see this in the drive for renewable energy, the tiny house movement, and even in boycotts. People will often boycott a product if they think the product is being produced through unethical means, such as palm oil boycotts in Europe. Critics will point out that the company will just shift to a different market that doesn’t care about how the palm oil was produced. The business might go so far as to treat their employees in third world countries even worse in order to make up for lost profits.
While this is probably true, it’s also a total copout. It denies that the people running the business have any agency themselves, that they simply have to do things the way they do them in order to even exist. Obviously we at TARTLE completely reject such an idea. We have to be able to expect real change out of companies as well as individuals. Pretending that certain entities just aren’t capable of that change is remarkably unhelpful and will actually make changing to something better even harder.
That’s another one of the ways we can use AI to our benefit. Our data can be used to educate the recalcitrant, to show them the impact of different choices on the world as a whole. We can then hope that people will make the kinds of decisions needed to build a truly better world.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
