SHADE Newsletter 14th November 2024

Welcome to the twenty sixth 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.

In this newsletter, we highlight approaches to the regulation of AI in health, and how Trump’s election win impacts these. We take a sweep through the latest on flooding, e-waste, mpox, bird flu and rabies, check in on COP29 and algorithmic harms, call out ‘relentless’ positivity, catch up with co-benefits and digital sobriety and much more.  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].   

Highlight on the Regulation of AI in Health

• In areas of medicine where AI first started to make an impact, the importance of post market surveillance was highlighted. Despite this, a recent review of reporting gaps in the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved AI medical devices noted that less than 10% of approvals made provision for post market surveillance. The FDA perspective shows they are aware of the challenges of post market evaluation of AI, but “the scale of effort needed could be beyond any current regulatory scheme”.

• It’s now very clear that regulatory schemes will only diminish under the new Trump administration. The FT reported on the likely relaxation of regulation of AI, and Big Tech more generally, and this message has been heavily reinforced in the past few days by the Trump team’s creation of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with a mission that includes slashing “excess regulations”. With Elon Musk, founder of medical device company Neuralink, leading the DOGE, already existing concerns around medical device industry influence over regulation have also been turbo charged.

• This is particularly concerning from the environmental sustainability perspective. The case for post market surveillance - in the form of carbon calculations both before and after implementation of digital health technologies - has been made. Some have gone beyond this, arguing that we need to widen the scope of concerns around AI for healthcare and reimagine how AI is evaluated.

• SHADE’s research has contributed to this reimagining, proposing new ethics frameworks for health research, one based on restraint and justice and another that also incorporates African philosophies. For the moment, in the US at least, the outlook looks bleak for approaches such as these.

News

• Nature considers what Trump’s election win could mean for AI, climate and health, examining how promises made will fare when it comes to implementation.

• Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution, looks at why so many died in Spain’s extreme flooding despite good forecasting.

• Reporting on this paper published in Nature Computational Science, The Register reveals GenAI's dirty secret: It's set to create a mountainous increase in e-waste.

• In the run up to COP29, the World Health Organisation demanded urgent integration of health in climate negotiations and the Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health (ATACH), hosted by WHO, previewed its 2024 to 2028 strategy. The final strategy is set to be officially launched at the COP.

• This month in the UK more cases of a new mpox strain have been found and a different strain of bird flu has been confirmed. This 2022 article in the Guardian highlighted the environmental links with surges in diseases such as mpox, and also that bird flu was the one to really watch.

What we’re listening to

• Sasha Luccioni talks about AI, nuclear power and digital sobriety on BBC News.

• Recordings from the European Healthcare Climate Summit 2024 are available here. 

What we’re reading

• Following recent events in Spain, a timely paper from Water Research on large-scale flood modeling and forecasting with FloodCast.

• This paper from Sustainable Development examines the very diverse co-benefits of Nature Based Solutions, and how digital platforms could better support them, and so amplify these co-benefits.

• Improving Food Security in Senegal. This co-benefits case study walks through the data and methodology behind actions to improve health and mitigate climate change in Senegal.

• A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms from the public interest initiative AIAAIC (AI, Algorithmic and Automation Incidents and Controversies).

• From Information, Communication and Society, The supply chain capitalism of AI: a call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through an environmental lens.

• Explore 2024/2025’s 10 New Insights in Climate Science and their policy implications.

• Defining Green UX, a column from Melissa Gregg in Interactions, from the Association for Computing Machinery. This article highlights a historic opportunity for designers to help tech users “see the effects of hardware and software choices, and the fragility of the ecosystem underpinning them”.

• Correspondence in the Lancet calls for digital health interventions as part of a One Health approach to eliminating rabies. This paper from Brazil details how climate change affects rabies distribution and dynamics.

• Check out Limits, which runs annual workshops on computing within limits, and explore papers from its past events.

• This opinion piece from DeSmog asks if the data supports ‘relentless positivity’ in the face of the climate crisis, and argues that connection with others is key if we are to able to respond effectively.

• Duncan Austin on tipping points and how they should feature more in presentations of global temperature data.

Events

• Register to join the zoom Exploring the Environmental Costs of AI from the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University on November 21st between 5.30 and 7pm ET.

• It’s not too late to register for the Global Digital Health Forum 2024, 4th to 6th December in Nairobi, Kenya and online.

• The 2025 DHIS2 annual conference will take place in Oslo, Norway between 10th and 13th June 2025.

Opportunities

• Check out the latest from the recently launched Climate Sensitive Infectious Diseases (CSID) Network. You can sign up to stay abreast of upcoming happenings, including working group opportunities in 2025.

• A call for papers on the topic of planetary health leadership from BMJ Leader.

• The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) offer the chance to do individual modules from their masters programmes - check out the options.

• if you are experiencing cognitive dissonance between the reality of climate change and the response in the organisation in which you work, check out this December 7th seminar. An online version is also available on January 20th and February 3rd 2025.

Finally, should we be fretting over AI’s feelings?

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