Four For Friday | Oct 4, 2024
LF142 | Taxing polluting cars makes kids walk to school, Cancer AI Alliance, Playbook for Civic Futures, Google's wildfire-spotting satellite project + Bain's AI report.
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!
London fined pollution and kids started walking
Put this in the column of “great that people are studying this stuff”. London introduced fines for high polluting cars and children got more active.
Within a year after the enforcement of the Ultra Low Emission Zones, 40% of kids switched from being driven to school to ‘active’ transport, i.e. walking, biking, scootering or taking public transport.
It’s unclear which was more important: the £12.50 daily charge that taxed drivers or the fact that parents felt better about their kids walking to school with less cars and less pollution. Likely a bit of both.
The So What? The multi-faceted negative externalities of cars haven’t been sufficiently studied. This is the kind of thing that can make the case for more efficient, collective solutions to our transport challenges.
Cancer AI Alliance launches with $40m
Four of the big US National Cancer Centers have got together with big tech (AWS, Microsoft and NVIDIA) together with Deloitte, to use AI to improve cancer care. Launched with $40m funding the alliance aims to pool data, methods and insights to improve cancer care.
The alliance will serve as a collaboration center by providing shared infrastructure and shaping industry standards, which will not only shift researchers from solving problems in isolation to solving them together but support greater health outcomes by exposing data trends for rare cancers and small populations that can result in more meaningful and broadly impactful discoveries.
The So What? Recognition that the key to successful AI models is going to be large amounts of data and industry expertise. Expect more of these kinds of collaborative alliances in future.
Playbook for Civic Futures
A playbook from Stanford’s d.school that provides a practical framework and advice for how communities can run forward-looking innovation sessions. Described as a “non-partisan guide to help school, community, and civic leaders design civic gatherings that are joyful, hopeful, and inspire people to take action for the future they want.”.
The playbook discusses 5 design principles:
Lead with Civic Imagination: What’s currently energizing your community? What could bring joy?
Promote Multiple Perspectives: Who needs to be in the room? How do we engage and support overlooked voices?
Build on on Bright Spots: What “bright spots” can be doubled-down on? What are non-traditional sources of bright spots that add value?
Make it Experiential (and Fun): What to make this interactive, participatory,
and co-creative? How to foster authentic emotion?
Hone the Production: What does high-quality experience look and feel like? Have you allowed for downtime? What production roles are needed? What budget is needed?
So What? A lightweight framework to surface diverse future-facing perspectives from your community. Try it out!
Spotting wildfires early
A new project supported by Google.org is launching that coordinates satellite imagery to create an early warning systems for wildfires.
With more than 50 satellites dedicated solely to watching wildfires, FireSat is expected to check wildfire activity across the globe every 20 minutes. It’s also supposed to detect fires as small as 5 x 5 meters (the size of a classroom). That’s significantly smaller than earlier satellites, which were able to find blazes two to three acres in size (the size of two football fields), according to Google.
The So What? Climate change is causing more, and more deadly, fires. The need for large-scale proactive, preventive tools such as this is growing; hopefully it’ll be connected to more efficient solutions to address it, like fire-engine-drones…
Bonus - AI Report of the Week
Bain Tech Report on AI - Bain are seeing an increase in EBITDA of up to 20% from initial generative AI projects (which according to the Exponential View newsletter, could drive a boost of global GDP of 2%).
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen