From babies to bees: five ways in which AI is good for the world

The flood of information about artificial intelligence never seems to end, and so much of it is focused on the workplace. Here’s a list of ways in which AI is good for the world.

A very long time ago, a daily columnist for a Cape Town newspaper wrote, passionately, that he felt these new-fangled cellphones were just not worth the trouble.

His objection? That they had to be charged all the time.

In a world in which telephones sat on your desk, or in your home, and just worked, this was a completely valid complaint: why would you have to keep remembering to charge a device which was, after all, just another way of talking to other people? (Which was all cellphones could do at that point.)

There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then (but batteries and their shelf-life remain, to this day, a point of irritation in the shiny things we carry around, that now contain a world of knowledge, and cat videos).

You know where I’m going with this: many people are reacting to all the new AI tools with the same scepticism felt by that newspaper columnist.

I’m not here to say that the sceptics are wrong, or to smugly point out how behind-the-times that columnist was all those years ago. Just as it was with cellphones, the paths that AI may take us down are unpredictable.

All we can do is learn as much as we can about AI – because it isn’t going to go away.

In this column I thought it might be useful to look at ways in which AI is truly helpful to humanity.

EXAMPLE NUMBER ONE: cutting stillbirths and neonatal deaths in Malawi

The Guardian reported in December 2024 that a clinic in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, is using AI-enabled foetal monitoring software which tracks a baby’s vital signs during labour, giving clinicians early warning of any abnormalities and giving them a chance to act on that information.

Since they began using it three years ago, the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the centre has fallen by 82%.

The Guardian notes: “The AI monitoring system needs less time, equipment and fewer skilled staff than traditional foetal monitoring methods, which is critical in hospitals in low-income countries such as Malawi, which face severe shortages of health workers.”

EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO: coping with climate change

The World Meteorological Organisation reckons AI-driven technologies can process enormous volumes of data, extract insightful knowledge and improve predictive models. UN News reports that that means improved modelling and prediction of climate change patterns which can help communities and authorities to think about what they need to do to deal with the effects of climate change.

For example, several UN agencies support communities in Burundi, Chad and Sudan through an AI-driven project which investigates past environmental change at displacement hotspots and delivers projections on which adaptation measures can be based, and which can be used to plan humanitarian programming.

In Kenya, the MyAnga app helps pastoralists brace for drought. With data from global meteorological stations and satellites sent to their mobile phones, herders can plan ahead, better manage their livestock and save hours of scouting for green pastures.

EXAMPLE NUMBER THREE: helping people with disabilities

As far back as 2019, it was reported that Chinese tech giant Huawei had developed an app that uses artificial intelligence to allow the visually impaired to “see” the emotion on the face of someone they are talking to by translating it into sound.

Huawei has also made a reading app, called StorySign that supports the sign language translation of selected classics for children, making it easier for deaf-mute children to enjoy reading and for families with hearing-impaired children to have parent-child reading time. 

EXAMPLE NUMBER FOUR: decoding old handwriting

The University of Calgary’s Libraries & Cultural Resources is using AI, specifically handwriting text recognition, to transcribe registers and diaries from as far back as the 1890s. The unit is using Transkribus, a platform developed at the University of Innsbruck in Austria that looks specifically at historical documents. Transkribus creates a model by studying a batch of digital images with writing by a single author to learn their nuances (Is that a “c” or an “e”?) before large bodies of that author’s work is transcribed. 

EXAMPLE NUMBER FIVE: studying bees

The World Bee Project uses AI and advanced technologies to monitor pollinator and biodiversity declines around the world. Their systems use sophisticated sensors in beehives and algorithms to capture and analyse temperature, humidity, in-hive acoustics, and bee flight data.

All that is combined with weather and satellite data to produce detailed information on the state of biodiversity in each environment they monitor. The data is added to the World Hive Network platform, which the Bee Project says is the first and the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to track the health of honeybees and their environments and, when possible, the health of wild pollinators and their ecosystems.

What all this means

If there’s one theme running through these examples, it’s the way in which AI (and coding generally) can work with large sets of data, or complicated data, to produce results that make a difference in people’s lives.

None of these things come to mind when yet another hyped, click-baity article arrives, pointing out that ChatGPT or similar don’t “know” something obvious.

But it would not be sensible to ditch climate change projections on that basis, would it?

THE QUESTION YOU WERE AFRAID TO ASK FOR FEAR OF LOOKING SILLY

Renee, what is an algorithm?

This is a word that comes up time and time again – it has become part of the furniture in lots of writing about technical subjects (and about social media too).

Courtesy of Perplexity (an AI-driven search engine), here’s a definition:

An algorithm is a structured set of instructions designed to perform a specific task or solve a particular problem. It can be thought of as a recipe that outlines a series of steps to achieve a desired outcome. Algorithms are fundamental in computer science and are essential for programming, data processing, and various computational tasks.

The key to understanding an algorithm is in the definition: the word recipe. A recipe for buttermilk rusks is an algorithm, just like Facebook’s set of rules for understanding that I cannot resist watching videos about Golden Retrievers. 

Here’s a good explanation of algorithms: What Is an Algorithm? | Definition & Examples

That’s it for this week. If there’s a question you’d like me to answer, or a topic you’d like covered, contact me here. I can’t promise to answer everything (especially deeply technical questions), but I can generally get us all pointed in the right direction.

Other things I have written

Renee’s four golden rules of artificial intelligence | Safe Hands

ChatGPT has killed content, and that’s a good thing | Safe Hands

Main picture: A bee in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, Cape Town. By Andrew Jooste, Unsplash

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