(AI) and the Internet of Things (Iot) in Sustainable Waste Management
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) in Sustainable Waste Management Jack O’Sullivan Environmental Management Services Ireland 1. Introduction Included among the most pressing problems facing human society on planet Earth at present are climate change, loss of biodiversity, and inefficient use of scarce resources. Readers will be well aware of the recent IPCC special report on how close we are becoming to unstoppable climate chaos, as the world approaches a number of “tipping points” beyond which it may not be possible to prevent a seriously damaging rise in global temperatures. Widespread loss of species has also been highlighted in a recent WWF report – clearly showing that human societies and their impacts are the cause of a mass extinction. Perhaps equally important, but less publicised, is the near-future shortage of some essential minerals, as much of what we extract from the Earth’s crust is used once and then discarded, to become waste. In addition, waste of valuable materials, failure to re-use, repair and recycle these valuable is contributing to global warming, as the amount of energy required to extract and process the materials we use is many times greater than the amounts of energy needed to re-process discarded items and to recover the embodied materials. Certain synthetic and composite materials are difficult to recycle; while the huge volume of discarded but potentially recyclable “wastes” presents another special challenge: how to separate each type of material, so that recyclers can be given relatively “pure” raw materials as a feedstock for re-processing. Waste prevention and waste elimination are equally important components of an integrated waste management strategy, together with re-using, refurbishing and repairing discarded items. At each of these stages, information has to be obtained; and, based on this information and on personal or expert judgments, decisions have to be made about whether an item can be re-used, repaired, the components removed, or the entire item consigned to landfill or incineration as a last resort. And before any of these processes are even considered, the design and manufacture of an item should have as a principal aim the goal of ensuring that the item can be easily disassembled, easily repaired, designed for long life, its components reusable to the maximum extent possible, and the materials comprising the item finally recycled or returned to harmlessly to the natural environment. This is the point where we make the transition from waste 1 management to the “Circular Economy”, an essential step in ensuring that we use materials and energy most efficiently. The question we need to ask is – how can Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) help to achieve these goals? But firstly, I would like to consider what AI and IoT have achieved, and what they can achieve, in a general sense. 2. Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things Artificial Intelligence A useful definition of what artificial intelligence can achieve is best expressed by stating that intelligent machines can perform functions similar to certain features of human intelligence, such as judgment, reasoning, recognition, learning and problem solving. Early attempts at artificial intelligence may be said to go back as far as the 13th century, medieval Arab astrologers developed a device known as the Zairja, which used the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet to signify 28 categories of philosophic thought. By combining number values associated with the letters and categories, new paths of insight and thought were created, i.e., new ideas could be created by mechanical means.1 The device was possibly introduced to Europe by the Catalan-Majorcan mystic, Ramon Llull (1234-1315) who became familiar with the zairja as a result of his travels and studies of Arab culture, and who used it as a prototype for his invention of the Ars Magna (The Great Art). We have to move forward in time to the mid-19th century before we find the next significant advance – the invention of the Analytic Engine by Charles Babbage and his co-worker Lady Ada Lovelace, who has been described as the first computer programmer. A further century was to pass before the development of stored-programme computers which were able to retain a memory; and it is only in the last 60-70 years have computational devices and programming languages been developed which were powerful enough to test concepts about what intelligence actually is. Alan Turing’s 1950 seminal paper in the philosophy journal Mind is considered to be a major turning point in the history of AI, while the term artificial intelligence was first used at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 – a meeting regarded as a historical event which opened up the field of artificial intelligence. In 1969, the first International Conference on Artificial Intelligence showed that AI had gained international recognition. Another turning point came with the development of knowledge-based systems in the 1960s and early 1970s, followed by rapid progress in understanding common modes of reasoning that are not strictly deductive, such as case-based reasoning, analogy, induction, reasoning under uncertainty (fuzzy logic), and default reasoning. 1 https://history-computer.com/Dreamers/Llull.html 2 Work on “neural networks’ in the 1980s accelerated the further improvement of knowledge expert systems; and, by the beginning of the 21st century, along with the development of deep learning neural network systems, artificial intelligence successfully achieved reliable image recognition; and these developments led to the current widespread industrialisation and use of artificial intelligence in many areas of economic and social activities. According to a recent briefing note prepared by the McKinsey Global Institute, “The time may have finally come for artificial intelligence after periods of hype followed by several “AI winters” over the past 60 years. AI now powers so many real-world applications, ranging from facial recognition to language translators and assistants like Siri and Alexa, that we barely notice it. Along with these consumer applications, companies across sectors are increasingly harnessing AI’s power in their operations. Embracing AI promises considerable benefits for businesses and economies through its contributions to productivity growth and innovation”.2 As just one example, the first voice to greet a visitor at the door of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) Customer Care Centre at Ibn Battuta Mall is “Rammas” – as well as listening patiently to customers’ concerns, Rammas also knows the customer’s entire history with DEWA! Rammas is no super-human; he (or rather “it”) is a robot that runs on artificial intelligence; and DEWA is one of the 29% of large enterprises in the Arabian Gulf which said they are planning to adopt artificial intelligence in 2018.3 As a result of this relatively rapid adoption of AI, many economies in the Arabian Gulf region are expected to grow – in the UAE, this technology is expected to contribute up to 14% to the country’s GDP by 2030. The UAE will be followed by Saudi Arabia, where AI is expected to contribute 12.4% to GDP, 8.2 % in the GCC-4 – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar – and 7.7% in Egypt. By comparison, the contribution of AI to China’s GDP will be 26.1% and 14.5% in North America by 2030.4 2 The Promise and Challenge of the Age of Artificial Intelligence; Briefing Note prepared by the McKinsey Global Institute for the Tallinn Digital Summit, October 2018. Accessed on 30 November 2018 from https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/artificial-intelligence/the- promise-and-challenge-of-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence. 3 Adding brains to machines, Middle East companies embrace AI. From https://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/adding-brains-to-machines-middle-east- companies-embrace-ai-1.778066. Accessed 04 December 2018. 4 From https://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/adding-brains-to-machines-middle- east-companies-embrace-ai-1.778066. Accessed 04 December 2018 3 The Internet of Things Turning now to the “Internet of Things”, we find similar rapid developmental progress in recent decades, to the extent that it has been next to impossible in recent years not to come across the term ‘‘Internet of Things’’ (IoT) one way or another.5 While the term Internet of Things is now more and more broadly used, there is no common definition or understanding today of what the IoT actually encompasses. The origins of the term date back more than 15 years and have been attributed to the work of the Auto-ID Labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on networked radio-frequency identification (RFID) infrastructures. Since then, visions for the Internet of Things have been further developed and extended beyond the scope of RFID technologies. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has defined the Internet of Things as ‘‘a global infrastructure for the Information Society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on, existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies.’’ 6 In the Internet of Things (IoT), a “thing” is an object of the physical world (physical things) or the information world (virtual things), which is capable of being identified and integrated into communication networks. A principal feature of the IoT is that it allows many devices to communicate with each other; a device being defined as an item