SHADE News

Welcome to the first edition of the SHADE newsletter! 

SHADE is a research hub with a mission to explore issues at the intersection of digital technologies/AI, health and the environment. It is guided by a fundamental question: How should the balance between AI/digital enabled health and planetary health be struck in different areas of the world, and what should be the guiding principles?

The SHADE newsletter comes out every two weeks, bringing you a selection of the latest news, upcoming events, academic publications and podcasts in the SHADE space.

For this first newsletter, we have cast our net a little further back than the last two weeks to provide a bumper inaugural edition.  We hope you enjoy it!

Please tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you think is missing at [email protected].   

News

• Nature reports on Earth’s hottest year on record

• The Ada Lovelace Institute took issue with the narrow focus of the UK AI Safety Summit on November 1st / 2nd, issuing a policy briefing prior to the summit which broadened ‘AI Safety’ to cover harms already apparent from AI, including environmental harms. Together with other civil society organisations and AI experts they also issued a joint post summit communique calling for a “wider range of voices and perspectives” to be included to ensure power is not concentrated in the tech industry, regulatory mechanisms are fit for purpose and AI systems work for everyone.

• The Economist reports on the rapid growth of virtual wards in the UK’s National Health Service.

• Computer Weekly highlight a new ChatGPT like tool to help companies with their ESG strategy.

• Scott Logic provide a timely overview of the Sustainable Computing Ecosystem.

• The Green Software Foundation are building on the research of their members to build a Software Carbon Efficiency Rating (SCER).

• Aga Khan Health Services have developed a tool for calculating the footprint of the health sector in Lower Middle Income Countries (LMICs).

• Wired assesses Apple’s claims that its new Apple Watch is carbon neutral.  Spoiler alert: It concludes that it isn’t.

• The Digital Good network is funding the development of a framework for the digital good in healthcare in low resource settings (sub–Saharan Africa) 

• Recent UK government funding to ‘revolutionise AI healthcare research’ is welcomed by Imperial College London 

• King’s College London gets funding to develop the UK’s first MedTech company builder 

• The Critical Carbon Computing Collective launched in the summer 2023 edition of Branch magazine from the Green Web Foundation. 

• AINow announces its intention to conduct ongoing analysis on how nations are developing industrial policy for AI, with the intention of ensuring civil society is empowered.  

• AINow published a report examining the intersection of climate and labour in the context of AI. 

• The prediction that the AI industry will use as much electricity as a country the size of the Netherlands by 2027 is widely reported.  Some reporting acknowledges that massive water consumption is also a downside of the explosion of AI.  However, there is no mention of other environmental damage linked to AI, for example from extractive mining, or e-waste.   

• Neurotechnology and neurodata – the information coming directly from the brain and nervous system - are in the news. Concerns are raised about their implications from a data privacy perspective by the ICO and from a human rights perspective by the Carr Institute.  There is no acknowledgement of the potential environmental impact of their predicted explosive growth. 

• Two reports from Nature, one on the latest advance in mobilising AI to prepare us for the next pandemic, and the other on how foundational models are gaining traction in medical AI, and Big Tech are on the case. Neither of these items mention the potential environmental impact of the AI.

Events

• The Global Digital Health Forum 2023 takes place between December 4th and 6th. Its conversations include Climate and Digital Health: Responsible Digital Health on a Heating Planet.

Academic Publications

• Designing digital health applications for climate change mitigation and adaption: This paper from the Medical Journal of Australia explains why digital health technology needs to mitigate its own carbon impact, and why it can also play a part in mitigating, and adapting to, climate change. It examines how digital health needs to be reframed for sustainability and equity and culminates in a call to action at individual and system levels.

• Digital transformation and sustainability in healthcare and clinical laboratories from Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (CCLM) highlights how a more holistic definition of sustainability is emerging in healthcare and acknowledges that digitalisation needs to be part of a functioning health ecosystem.

• The Environmental Impact of AI: A Case Study of Water Consumption by Chat GPT from the International Innovation Journal looks at how this impact can be managed at various levels.

• A systematic review of trustworthy and explainable artificial intelligence in healthcare: Assessment of quality, bias risk, and data fusion from Information Fusion highlights the importance of explainable AI (XAI) for trust and how critical data fusion can be.

• A survey on artificial intelligence for reducing the climate footprint in healthcare from Energy Nexus introduces the concept of “Tiny AI” or AI optimised for energy consumption, as well as recognising the importance of XAI.

• Reimagining research ethics to include environmental sustainability: a principled approach, including a case study of data-driven health research from the Journal of Medical Ethics takes a more critical stance, recognising that research must be more parsimonious. It comes up with a research ethics framework to support this.

Podcasts

• AI in health care: hope or hype from the Health Foundation asks whether AI could be key to sustaining the NHS. 

• Planet Centred Care podcast series from the BMJ explores issues related to environmentally sustainable healthcare.   

• The Green Innovation Group’s Sustainable Healthcare Podcast series has an episode on Life Cycle Assessments from Norway.