Things with which this World Cup is laden so far: Geopolitical intrigue and controversy. Messy soccer-world drama. Improbable first-half England goals.

And, of course: A slate of hyped-up artificial intelligence applications.

Wait, what?

FIFA is touting an AI-powered decision-making system that will use sensors in the actual soccer ball to help determine calls. A vast network of facial recognition-enabled cameras will track the crowd, with technology in the same family as that deployed by the controversial firm Clearview AI. AI-powered sensors in the stadiums will even help control the climate.

Which all sounds very cool. But it also raises the question — is all that really “AI”? And if it is, how is it possible that the same technology is powering such a disparate slate of applications, not to mention generating surreal art, or prefab legal documents?

In one sense, the AI hype around this World Cup is just a marketing push by the host country and organization. Qatar prides itself on having used its (relatively) newfound natural-gas fortune to power it into the ranks of other wealthy gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and FIFA has aggressively played up its high-tech additions to the game.

This buzzy invocation of AI is the flip side of the anxiety that has been rising around the technology among industry watchdogs. Both ways of thinking about AI tend to conflate different issues into one big topic. And they all both point to a larger question: How is the public supposed to think about AI?

One reason that matters, a lot, right now: Politics have finally discovered AI. The Biden administration is attempting to nudge the field toward its preferred values and practices with the AI Bill of Rights. Europe is doing the same, but with statutory teeth. Governments are moving to regulate AI at a pace that’s slower than the technology itself is developing, but faster than the layperson’s understanding of it. That poses a political problem, as the marketing “wow factor” around AI increasingly obscures how it actually works and impacts our lives, leaving the public relatively clueless in the face of the regulatory decisions being made.

“If the yellow first-down line in football appeared today rather than in 1998, they’d say it was generated by AI,” said Ben Recht, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley who has written extensively on AI and machine learning. “AI has become nothing more than a marketing term to mean ‘things we do automatically with computers.’”

The history of what artificial intelligence actually is might be beyond the scope of this afternoon newsletter. The mathematics and computing historian Stephanie Dick described the term’s long semantic drift in a 2019 essay for the Harvard Data Science Review that focused on the field’s roots in computer-powered attempts to model human intelligence. As the field drifted away from that effort and toward powerful machine-learning systems like those that power DALL-E or GPT-3, the initial branding has stuck, obscuring those systems’ actual functions behind a fog of hype and sci-fi speculation about sentient machines or human-like “general artificial intelligence.”

We’ve now come to use AI as a basket term for, as computer scientist Louis Rosenberg put it when I talked to him, “processing massive datasets, finding patterns in those datasets, and then using those patterns to make predictions or draw insights.”

When you put it that way, AI’s application to a soccer ball or an AC system is (slightly) demystified. But that only scratches the surface of how those machine-learning systems are insinuating themselves into our lives. The policy discourse around AI right now focuses on much more high-stakes issues like systemic bias creeping into decision-making systems, or unchecked facial-recognition surveillance like that being deployed in Qatar right now, or data harvesting without consent.

Those are the kinds of issues that show up in the Biden administration’s new AI policy, but there’s still a massive gulf in understanding between policymakers and the public on the issue. A Stanford report written last year noted that “accurate scientific communication has not engaged a sufficiently broad range of publics in gaining a realistic understanding of AI’s limitations, strengths, social risks, and benefits,” and that “Given the historical boom/bust pattern in public support for AI, it is important that the AI community not overhype specific approaches or products and create unrealistic expectations” — a dynamic likely not helped by the World Cup hype machine.

And while guidelines like the Biden administration’s might be useful, they’re still… just guidelines. There are still few, if any, laws in place to prevent the kind of AI-induced harms that might be perpetuated under the radar amid a general haze of curiosity and misunderstanding — which makes public understanding of the tech far more important than one might at first think.

“First, AI isn’t some form of magic and, second, that we aren’t on a predetermined path with regard to where the technology is headed and what we do with it,” Maximilian Gahntz, senior policy researcher at the Mozilla Foundation, told me. “As consumers, people get to vote with their feet if they have the necessary information to make informed choices about products and services that use AI. And as voters, people can push for tech companies and those deploying AI to be held accountable.”

Read the article here: What an AI-powered World Cup obscures

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is launching a new Office of Financial Technology early next year in response to the growth of fintech, the agency said Thursday.

The new office will “build on and incorporate” the Office of Innovation, which the agency started in 2016.

“Financial technology is changing rapidly, and bank-fintech partnerships are likely to continue growing in number and complexity,” said Michael Hsu, acting comptroller of the currency. “To ensure that the federal banking system is safe, sound, and fair today and well into the future, we need to have a deep understanding of financial technology and the financial technology landscape. The establishment of this office will enable us to be more agile and to promote responsible innovation, consistent with our mission.”

Some progressive senators have been urging the OCC to change its previous guidance, which gives chartered banks the ability to provide crypto custody, hold cash reserves backing stablecoins, and use blockchain and stablecoins to verify bank-to-bank payments. The senators say that the guidance exposes banks to “unnecessary risk.”

Meanwhile, more Wall Street firms and large banks are moving further into the use of cryptocurrencies.

Read the article here: The OCC is opening a new office for fintech

Besides saving energy and reducing costs, smart street lighting can provide a backbone for innovative and cutting-edge IoT city deployments.

Local governments are interested in smart city deployments and growth; the SmartAmerica Growth challenge estimates that local administrations will invest more than $40 trillion over the next two decades in internet-of-things technology for smart cities. And cities like New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Seattle are already heavily invested in smart city programs that focus on waste management, community engagement and reducing energy costs.

With the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act last year making more than $600 billion available for programs that touch smart city initiatives like smart traffic sensors, cities must be mindful of initial investments that will help other programs grow over time. One of the best places to start could easily be overlooked: smart street lighting.

Smart street lighting might seem like an aging topic, but it can be a backbone for innovative and cutting-edge IoT city deployments. Here’s how switching on the lights can help pave the way for more advanced programs.

Furthering smart cities

Connected lights help smart cities better manage their energy use and keep costs low, while also helping improve citizen safety. Between 2017 and 2022, research shows the implementation of street light use cases has grown from 61% to 72% and is expected to continue growing.

By using the right technology, cities can leverage the ubiquitous outdoor wireless communications infrastructure needed to support IoT street lighting initiatives to deploy a range of other IoT applications such as environmental monitoring or smart traffic sensors.

As a first step, planners could enable remote monitoring of lighting controls based on whether pedestrians or cyclists are in the area, or whether parts of the city, such as tunnels or bridges, need illuminating. Once the network and infrastructure are in place, other applications and services can share the same communications infrastructure, therefore reducing the overall costs of the IoT network infrastructure.

Recent research indicates that ever more IT decision makers are using IoT initiatives, like street lighting, to gain a competitive advantage (up to 29% from 20% in 2017). Cities can stand out among their counterparts by prioritizing IoT progress, and they can also appeal to more potential residents looking for a safer, more environmentally friendly place to buy or rent a home.

An international example

The City of London — or the Square Mile — is the historic financial district of the larger area widely known as London. The City of London has just 9,400 permanent residents — but up to 1 million people at peak times — and shows the impact that IoT street lighting can have on a community. The City has a goal to take control of its rising energy costs, lower energy use and improve public safety by replacing its outdated lighting system (around 12,000 lights). Specifically, the focus was on lighting streets, walkways, landmarks, bridges and tunnels.

While the project is young, it’s already saved around 80,000 kWh over the past financial year and has laid the groundwork for other smart functionality, including monitoring life preservers and environmental sensors on the Thames and other sensors as part of a zero-emissions pilot program. It started with a straightforward upgrade of aging streetlights and the foresight to base the network on a scalable communications technology, showing just how powerful this piece of the smart city puzzle can be in furthering progress.

Cutting down costs and saving energy

Because governments always keep an eye on their budgets and look for ways to reduce expenses, implementing smart street lights can go a long way in driving down energy bills and keeping them low. Case in point: Intelligent Energy Europe actually found that an obsolete lighting system could account for as much as 50% of a typical city’s entire energy bill.

Putting connected street lights in place improves efficiency and reduces energy consumption, therefore lowering costs. Additionally, they require less upkeep than traditional lighting, making them a smarter, more cost-efficient investment for the long-term.

The environmental and business cases are clear for starting the transition toward becoming a smart city by implementing connected street lights. If cities are looking for a way to fast-track energy and cost savings and IoT progress need look no further.

Read the article here: Can smart streetlights kick-start smart city progress? Yes, they can.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance has become an increasing focus for investors and corporate boards alike – but it wasn’t always this way.

A recent report from Natixis Investment Managers found that back in 2014, 48% of institutional investors said ESG approaches were more about window dressing than making a difference. That’s all changed – and so have the expectations of enterprise software customers, as sustainability is now an important part of the selection criteria for technology buyers. We are in the era of ESG as an imperative.

The ESG imperative has been brought to the forefront by geopolitical conflicts, the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chain pressure and climate change. Enterprise vendors need their CEOs to establish a strong ESG foundation, with ambitious future targets, as CEO Darren Roos notes in the latest ESG Sustainability Report from IFS:

Now more than ever, there must be a global focus on building a brighter future for the next generation, and the imperative for businesses and institutions to lead from the front is greater than at any other point in history.

The manufacturing industry has a critical role to play in the sustainability movement. While technology will always be part of the solution, ultimately the goal is change.

Vendors, customers and suppliers are looking for ways to make changes in a meaningful but manageable and sustainable way. There are several ways that companies can drive change and achieve a culture of sustainability:

Choose the right business applications that support your long-term sustainability requirements

Executive teams need business applications that satisfy ESG-related demands well beyond compliance – to enable them to exceed their sustainability goals. Decision makers should look for capabilities to make certain they’re prepared to measure and manage not just by financial value, but environmental and social impact. In addition to ESG reporting, key sustainability enablers to consider include:

• Artificial intelligence. Managing cost, revenue and the environmental impacts of product, services or operations can rapidly become a complex scenario. AI can help here, for example, by optimising the scheduling and routes of field service technicians to decrease the number of miles driven or reduce fuel consumption.
• Circularity. Management of a circular product lifecycle to minimize waste should not only encompass data needed to manufacture a product, but also include a carefully constructed plan for decisions and costs associated with reuse, recycling, reverse logistics, remanufacturing, lifecycle extension or disposal.
• Consider the whole business. Too often, a company will simply implement an ERP system’s financial module, but sustainability requirements mean they also need to consider the supply chain and HR modules to document sourcing and labour practices in an auditable environment
• Carbon footprint. To calculate carbon emissions, businesses need activity data such as fuel, electricity, transport, water, waste and refrigerant gases. Calculating this in Excel is still very common; driving the need for tech-driven solutions to reduce time spent collecting activity data.

Help customers and partners to be more sustainable and deliver more sustainable products 

Technology providers need to recognise the urgency of the move manufacturers are making to achieve more sustainable operations, and the specific value sustainability can deliver.

Demonstrating the potential value technology solutions will bring, and how vendors can advance manufacturers’ sustainability goals, comes next. Often, it works to start small with a clearly defined goal and build on that over time. The key is to identify your material ESG topics and develop a focused strategy. Often in manufacturing prioritized focus is on areas where sustainable manufacturing can have a big impact.

We’ve seen numerous examples of how technology solutions delivered by providers that share their customers’ vision of sustainability can yield compelling value. For example, IFS has played a vital role in realizing Rolls-Royce’s ‘Intelligent Engine’ vision. The Blue Data Thread enabled by the partnership between Rolls-Royce and IFS provides the data connectivity between airline and Rolls-Royce that allows businesses to significantly increase the time between engine overhauls and therefore reduce emissions.

Silvermill Group has also reaped benefits including the ability to control factors such as electricity and water, cut down on wastage and be more environmentally efficient.

Continuously influence change through transparency

Delivering on sustainability can’t just be a ‘once and done thing’. Manufacturers need to be continuously focusing on sustainability efforts not only across their business but also the extended supply chain to make a meaningful impact.

Naturally, the technology partners they choose need to be onboard with that journey to facilitate the technology changes needed. There has to be two-way discussion and open, transparent, continuous engagement, so that in turn, providers can continue to deliver value.

That value shifts over time, especially as consumers and customers mature in their sustainability performance, and therefore needs to be tracked and measured. This transparency, together with a common mindset and a shared, positive vision will lead to genuine joint value creation.

It is regarded as completely normal to measure every dollar that contributes to financial performance. The same approach needs to be taken in measuring ESG performance. This may add new layers of complexity and creates new requirements for ERP. Frameworks for measuring and reporting on ESG performance are continuously evolving, , and both customers and funders are demanding “show, don’t tell” data to create credibility.

So how do we get started?

1. Act now. Technology providers and manufacturers alike need to realise that the time for action on ESG performance and sustainability is now – and that they cannot and should not wait for government to take the lead, nor let regulations take them by surprise . While governmental consensus on ESG elements such as climate change and the environment is critically important, there is much that manufacturers and the software community can do to advance towards their sustainability goals. Starting small with a defined objective gets the journey under way.
2. Share the process with stakeholders. To meet ESG goals, enterprise software should be accompanied by sound organizational structure and processes. A strong governance structure, and roles and responsibility with clearly defined sustainability objectives ensure performance. By communicating information clearly enterprise-wide employees are more likely to acquire the skills and knowledge required to ensure the organization reaches its goals.
3. Assess the range of technologies (and data) needed. Sustainability doesn’t happen in a sole, peripheral technologies or data might be adopted to supplement your ERP system and bring you closer to meeting ESG goals. Consider an ecosystem approach with other solutions or external data sources as part of a composable architecture.

Manufacturers should not hold back but instead move positively forward on the path to sustainability by finding the right technology partner and creating that proactive, forward-looking team. At IFS, we have laid strong foundations to be able to achieve long-term change.

Read the article here: Manufacturers are embracing the ESG imperative – now they must find the technology to bring it to life