Empowering AI For The Greater Good

AI doesn’t have many role models in popular media. From the cold, ambivalent antagonism of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000, to the dystopian future world of The Matrix, AI is often depicted as an existential threat to humanity, seeking to control, manipulate, or otherwise dominate mankind. Forrester has written extensively about the concerns of improperly applied AI technologies in the real world. But comparatively little ink has been spilled on the organizations using AI as a force for good today. In celebration of Artificial Intelligence Appreciation Day (yes, that’s a thing), we’ve compiled some of the most interesting and impactful applications we’ve seen in recent years, including:

• AI for conservation. Biodiversity is critical to the sustained health and functioning of our ecosystems, but climate change and loss of habitat are driving many species to the brink of extinction. This issue is compounded by the persistent efforts of poachers, who hunt numerous animals already under threat. Detecting these elusive figures (both poachers and rare species) is extremely challenging, requiring the surveillance of vast areas of wilderness. Synthetaic specializes in building models where real image data is scarce to help organizations like Save The Elephants protect wildlife by automatically detecting these animals and those who would do them harm.
• AI for humanitarianism. Little goes undocumented in the age of the smartphone. In contrast with the above example, having too much data can also be a problem. Human rights organizations seek to document war crimes and other atrocities carried out in conflict areas, but they are often inundated with massive amounts of images and videos to review. In warzones like Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine, Adam Harvey and the V-Frame team seek to hold perpetrators of war crimes accountable, by documenting the use of illegal munitions through crowdsourced images and videos. In Yemen, for example, V-Frame and their partners poured through nearly 6 billion frames of video footage to demonstrate the usage of BLU-63s – a cluster munition banned in more than 100 countries. Reviewing this footage manually would not only be extremely time-consuming – it would be psychologically damaging, deterring this important work from being carried out.
• AI for safety. A variety of AI technologies are rapidly improving the safety of workplace environments, leveraging real-time sensor data to detect potential hazards and suggest safety measures proactively. Machine olfaction, or e-noses, can help to detect hazardous substances in industrial settings to provide early warnings. Augmented reality wearables can offer workers a wide range of benefits, including better training and notification of dangerous areas on job sites. Safety AI isn’t just limited to the workplace; companies like Datagen are developing advanced Driver Monitoring Systems to detect tired or distracted driving.
• AI for accessibility. You didn’t think we’d make it through this whole blog without mentioning generative AI, did you? While AI has been a behind-the-scenes boon for accessibility for some time now, use cases are exploding with the newfound prominence of gen AI. Transcription services, image captioning, alternative text (508 compliance), transcription and translation, and text-to-speech services are all easier than ever before to carry out automatically. Generative AI also enables previously impossible applications, like synthetic signers from Signapse, which allows any information to be converted into sign language videos for hearing-impaired individuals.

We don’t need to wait for Iron Man’s Jarvis or C-3PO to come around to see AI changing our lives for the better – we just need to know where to look today.

This post was written by VP, Principal Analyst Brandon Purcell and Researcher Jeremy Vale and it originally appeared here.