Our lives are made up of transactions, almost everything has value. But what value can we give to protecting biodiversity, i.e. nature – from whose intelligence we benefit? How can it be conveyed and understood that there is more money to be made by preserving ecosystems than by destroying them? For some time now, science has been concerned with calculating the value of the annual services that ecosystems provide to our society. Artificial intelligence helps in many ways.
Can AI save nature? The biologist Frauke Fischer and the economist Hilke Oberhansberg ask this question in their book of the same name. In nine chapters they devote themselves intensively and sometimes pointedly to intelligence and evolution, learning and technology, nature and its threats as well as its protection, and again and again to the problems of various cost-benefit calculations.
Although the transitions between individual sections are not always smooth, we feel that it is a human-made book and not an AI-generated one. The comprehensible explanations, which combine theoretical considerations and practical implementations, as well as the presentation of various research models, are enriched with graphics, photographs and information boxes, for example on liver flukes, animal seismographs or valuable manganese nodules.
There are numerous examples of how AI alone can help with the precise observation and recording of animals: for example, when it comes to wild animals in confusing terrain, at night or in dense vegetation, as well as in the open sea. How many elephants are in one place, how do they migrate? Double counting when migrating cranes is avoided. The beautiful and shy beluga whales can be better identified and individually analyzed thanks to an AI called “You Only Look Once”.
Fischer and Oberhans urgently point out one problem: that AI requires an incredibly large amount of natural, sometimes rare, resources that cannot be precisely quantified. So how do we protect nature with AI when its use and application consumes so much energy that biodiversity is lost? The authors provide ideas and optimization options and do not hide the fact that they have not eaten the protective wisdom with leaves. Alexander Schramm
Frauke Fischer, Hilke Oberhansberg:
Can AI save nature?
oekom publishing house. 216 pages, €26