AI for A Better World

It’s my belief that technology is a foundational element in the effort to build a better society. From the international space station, to the internet, to quantum computing, we have seen technology rapidly propelling humanity forward. However, it’s not enough to build new technology and let it loose on the world. Instead, we need to develop a vision for a future and use technology to support that view. We believe in a better world: one where humanity’s greatest ideas are realized and life is better for everyone on the planet. At Hypergiant this means tackling the biggest challenges of today and tomorrow by focusing on creating impactful solutions that change the way we live and work. 

I believe in a future that is more resilient, more inclusive and more secure. 

I imagine a future where:

• Society is inclusive, resilient and sustainable.
• Food and clean water are secure and readily available.
• Nations are secure and resilient. 
• People are able to work from anywhere, as they want. 
• We find a balance between our advanced society and nature.

These are essential developments in the evolution of the human species and will help to protect the planet from the increasing number of global shocks related to climate change, economic insecurity and overpopulation. Technology alone is not the solution. We need policy change, social change and changes in development. Yet, we can build technologies to respond to these issues in correlation with broad social, economic, policy and developmental changes -- and I believe AI will play an extraordinary role in that roadmap. 

As an example, Hypergiant has developed software and hardware solutions that are focused on helping us achieve this vision of the future, and we are constantly focused on partnering with businesses and governments who share this view. The more we focus on software and core emergent technologies, the more we see are able to contribute to the solutions that underpin the future. 

Creating society that is inclusive, resilient and sustainable means that we build technologies and solutions that help more people connect with society, that improves resilience to the changes in our environment and that helps to create more sustainable methods of living. To date, we’ve done this with the Eos Bio Reactor, our disaster preparedness tools and our carbon capture simulator ACES.  

Ensuring that food and clean water are secure and readily available is one of the most pressing challenges of our future. As our planet grows, we are further and further depleting natural resources, creating unsustainable supply chains and pushing our food further away from our living centers -- meanwhile farmers are committing suicide at an alarming rate and its no longer a viable living for huge numbers of people. We cannot sustain this model. As a response, we are working to use predictive modeling and predictive maintenance technologies to improve our food security and access to water. And, I hope to share more on this next year. 

A better future is one where people feel secure and nations are resilient to attack. I don’t believe utopia is within our reach but I do believe that we can do better when faced with outside threats. Threats come in all forms digital, physical, and now they are arising at a faster pace in lower earth orbit and eventually in lunar and martian environments. As a response to changing threats, we have created a constellation software system in partnership with the US Airforce and have also created HIVE which is a remote from anywhere satellite management tool. 

Concurrently, we must find a balance between the needs of our advanced societies and our natural world. For me, this means aggressively moving forward with ideas while also understanding and protecting the natural environment around us. It means understanding the thought process and philosophy behind ideas like rewilding and yet, finding viable solutions to do so. As a company, we have worked on predictive solutions to track snow leopards and leading partnerships with scientists around the world to test and engage new ways to ensure the world around us is protected both now and in the future. Scientists agree that today's extinction rate is hundreds, or even thousands, of times higher than the natural baseline rate. This is alarming. Eventually the animal going extinct will be humans if we do not put a stop to it now. 

Finally, we believe that a better world is one where people are able to work from anywhere, as they want. It’s becoming more and more evident that work is changing: COVID-19 didn’t create this shift, it simply magnified and accelerated it. AI and emerging technology are pivotal to making this easier, faster and more connected. It’s our belief that this can be done better and we have developed a core AI platform that can improve fleet management, predictive maintenance and predictive inventory usage and more to ensure that this work is done faster, safer and with less time in office. Accenture has estimated a minimum of 40% increase in realizable productivity for companies that would be adopting AI by the year 2023 and we think it could be even higher. 

There are a number of other AI solutions that we must also look to as we move forward and those are being provided by hundreds of thousands of companies across the globe. With AI, we will be able to better predict migration flow, crop disasters and weather changes. But, we will also be able to respond with cutting edge technologies like Direct Air Capture (DAC), electric vehicles and decentralized farming made possible by our ability to understand millions of data inputs and determine new and better ways to develop solutions. But, it’s more than that.

As Microsoft’s David Coplin shared “It will change how we relate to each other. I would argue that it will even change how we perceive what it means to be human.” I believe this to be true. As we move far into the future and AI is not just the technology tool that engenders a new future, but goes further than that potentially into being a new species, we must grow our familiarity with the topic. 

To become more familiar and maximize AI benefits, Brookings recommended nine steps for going forward:

• Encourage greater data access for researchers without compromising users’ personal privacy,
• invest more government funding in unclassified AI research,
• promote new models of digital education and AI workforce development so employees have the skills needed in the 21st-century economy,
• create a federal AI advisory committee to make policy recommendations,
• engage with state and local officials so they enact effective policies,
• regulate broad AI principles rather than specific algorithms,
• take bias complaints seriously so AI does not replicate historic injustice, unfairness, or discrimination in data or algorithms,
• maintain mechanisms for human oversight and control, and
• penalize malicious AI behavior and promote cybersecurity.

This is a start. There is so much that is possible but there is work that we must do today to protect the world of tomorrow.