SHADE Newsletter 25th January 2024

Welcome to the fifth 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 concerns about greenwashing in tech - deliberate and inadvertent. We take a sweep through the latest on AI in health and the recent WHO guidelines in response to its explosive growth, check in on the race to bring sufficient renewable energy online in time to combat the rebound effect, call out the responsibilities of the medical research community, take a look at compostable electronics 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 Greenwashing

• From carbon aware to grid aware - Hannah Smith cuts to the chase to expose the greenwashing dangers in carbon aware software. You can also find a version of the article here, with automated audio included, and an intro from Ismael Velasco who was responsible for the initial research and insights.

• Melissa Gregg and Yolande Strengers use insider knowledge to expose how the tech industry deploys ever more sophisticated software around achieving and monitoring specific ‘sustainability’ targets, which often serve to distract from real climate action.

News

• Nature highlights the similarities between drug development and AI models in medicine - how both often demonstrate huge promise early on, before bigger trials reveal less of an impact. The danger with AI models is that only about a fifth are being put through the ‘bigger trials’ which, in the AI world, are tests using data other than the data that was used to train the models.

• Meanwhile AI in drug discovery gets a boost as AlphaFold predictions demonstrate that, in some cases, they could dramatically reduce the duration of the discovery process.

• Nature calls on researchers to move quickly to help fill the gaps in the EU’s AI Act.

• The New Scientist reports on the chances of AI having the ultimate adverse impact on human health

• There is hope that AI could become more efficient by learning as it goes and thereby removing the need for supersized up front training data. This would make a big difference to environmental impacts, which are attributable to the training phase as well as the deployment phase.

• As generative AI, and specifically large multi modal models (LMMs), are adopted faster than any consumer application in history, WHO has issued more guidance on the ethics and governance of LLMs in health. The guidance does address the carbon and water footprints associated with LMMs, although not the extractive mining or pollution. Reporting on WHO’s guidance, Nature warns of the dangers of medical AI for poorer nations, but with no explicit mention of climate change, arguably the greatest danger for the health of poorer nations.

What we’re listening to

• Can Electronics become compostable? from IEEE Spectrum’s Fixing the Future podcast series.

• The latest in the Environment Variables series from the Green Software Foundation. This podcast explores how GSF’s Impact Framework tool will measure the environmental impact of software across diverse environments, from mobile devices to the cloud.

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

What we’re reading

• Can the rollout of renewables meet the rate of increase in energy demand? In the UK Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment say the answer is yes. But is the government onside and are we accurately assessing the rebound effect?

• An article from the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s SDG Knowledge Hub highlighting the advantages of digital health for combatting the effects of climate change in the Global South.

• Another call for the research community - including sponsors - to act responsibly with regard to the environment. This time following a global survey on clinical trials.

• This foundational study for better understanding e-waste in clinical trials is a valuable tool for striking the best balance between the negative and positive implications of these trials.

• Tailored cancer care moves a step closer, but there are many issues with the wide scale adoption of whole genome sequencing (WGS) in the clinical setting, not least of which is the environmental cost, which needs to be recognised and addressed.

• Apple have a lot riding on Siri’s new health features as it loses the latest round in a battle over patents of its blood oxygen monitor, and competitors harness generative AI to connect the dots between your health metrics.

• Two papers shine a light on healthcare ecosystems and innovation management in implementing digital/AI enabled health. The first highlights how “regulatory positioning” can determine the success or otherwise of digital health startups and the second at how “innovation intermediaries” cannot exempt themselves from responsibility for addressing sustainability challenges. For more background on ecosystems, this paper looks at the making of a MedTech cluster.

Events

• What’s in store for health and care in 2024? A free, online event from the King’s Fund coming up on Tuesday, 30th January at 12pm.

• AI UK 2024 from the Alan Turing Institute, 19th and 20th March.

Opportunities

• Digital Good Network Fellowships - 30th April deadline for expressions of interest.

• Applications open for the Digital Good Research Fund 2024 - 25th April submission deadline.

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