Etiam vitae dapibus rhoncus. Eget etiam aenean nisi montes felis pretium donec veni. Pede vidi condimentum et aenean hendrerit. Quis sem justo nisi varius tincidunt nec aliquam arcu tempus vel laoreet lorem.
It’s not just medicines. A dizzying number of personal care products also end up in the sewers—coconut shampoos and hydrating body washes and expensive face serums and … well, the list goes on and on. Wastewater treatment facilities were never designed to deal with these so-called micropollutants. “For the first 100 years or so of wastewater treatment, you know, the big thing was to prevent infectious diseases,” Wackett says.
Today, many wastewater treatment plants mix wastewater and air in a tank to form an activated sludge—a process that helps bacteria break down pollutants. This system was originally designed to remove nitrogen, phosphates, and organic matter—not pharmaceuticals. When bacteria in the sludge do metabolize drugs like metformin, it’s a happy accident, not the result of intentional design.
Certain technologies that rely on bacteria can do a better job of getting rid of these tiny pollutants. For example, membrane biological reactors combine activated sludge with microfiltration, while biofilm reactors rely on bacteria grown on the surface of membranes. There are even anaerobic “sludge blankets” (worst name ever), in which microbes convert contaminants to biogas in an oxygen-poor environment. But these technologies are expensive, and treatment facilities aren’t required to ensure that treated water is free of these contaminants. At least not in the US.
The European Commission is on its way to adopting new rules stipulating that by 2045, larger wastewater treatment facilities will have to remove a whole host of micropollutants. And in this case, the polluters—pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies—will pay 80% of the cost. The pharmaceutical industry is not a fan of this idea. Trade groups say the new rules will likely result in drug shortages.
In the US, the federal government is still trying to figure out how to deal with these pollutants. It’s tricky, because it’s not entirely clear what impact small quantities of pharmaceuticals in water will have on the environment and human health. And the risk varies depending on the medication in question. Some pose a clear threat. Oral contraceptives, for example, have caused fertility issues and sex switching in fish.
Could bacteria save us from estrogen too? Maybe. More than 100 estrogen-degrading microbes have been identified. We just need to find a way to harness them.
Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive
In a 2023 issue of The Checkup, my colleague Jessica Hamzelou introduced us to the scientists who study the exposome—all the chemicals we eat, drink, inhale, and digest. Here’s the story.
Hamzelou also wrote about another pervasive pollutant: microplastics. They’re everywhere, and we still don’t really understand what they’re doing to us.
Hainikoye hits Accept and a young woman greets him in Hausa, a gravelly language spoken across West Africa’s Sahel region. She has three new cows, and wants to know: Does he have advice on getting them through the lean season?
Hainikoye—a twentysomething agronomist who has “followed animals,” as Sahelians refer to herding, since he first learned to walk—opens an interface on his laptop and clicks on her village in southern Niger, where humped zebu roam the dipping hills and dried-up valleys that demarcate the northern desert from the southern savanna. He tells her where the nearest full wells are and suggests feeding the animals peanuts and cowpea leaves—cheap food sources with high nutritional value that, his screen confirms, are currently plentiful. They hang up after a few minutes, and Hainikoye waits for the phone to ring again.
Seven days a week at the Garbal call center, agents like Hainikoye offer what seems like a simple service, treating people to a bespoke selection of location-specific data: satellite-fed weather forecasts and reports of water levels and vegetation conditions along various herding routes, as well as practical updates on brushfires, overgrazed areas, nearby market prices, and veterinary facilities. But it’s also surprisingly innovative—and is providing critical support for Sahelian herders reeling from the effects of interrelated challenges ranging from war to climate change. Over the long term, the project’s supporters, as well as the herders connecting with it, hope it could even safeguard an ancient culture that functions as an economic lifeline for the entire region.
The glossy red cubicles of Garbal’s office in Niamey, Niger’s capital, are tucked away in the second-floor space the call center shares with the local headquarters of Airtel, an Indian telecom. It had only been open for a few weeks when I visited early last year. Bursts of fuchsia bougainvillea garlanded the entryway to the building, a welcome respite from the sand-colored landscape and sewage-infused scent of the rotting industrial district around it. One lot over sat a former Total gas station that has remained unbranded since a drug cartel bought it to launder money and removed the sign. Running across the zone was a boulevard commemorating a 1974 coup d’état, which has been followed by four more over the ensuing five decades, the latest in July 2023. In the middle of the boulevard sat a few dozen miles of decomposing railway tracks that had been “inaugurated” by a right-wing French billionaire in 2016. For decades, postcolonial elites, promising development, have pillaged one of Africa’s poorest countries.
In more recent years, various Western players touting tech trends like artificial intelligence and predictive analysis have swooped in with promises to solve the region’s myriad problems. But Garbal—named after the word for a livestock market in the language of the Fulani, an ethnic group that makes up the majority of the Sahel’s herders—aims to do things differently. Building on an approach pioneered by a 37-year-old American data scientist named Alex Orenstein, Garbal is focused on how humbler technologies might effectively support the 80% of Nigeriens who live off livestock and the land.
“There’s still this idea of ‘How can we use new tech?’ But the tech is already there—we just need to be more intentional in applying it,” Orenstein says, arguing that donor enthusiasm for shiny, complex solutions is often misplaced. “All of our big wins have come from taking some basic-ass shit and making it work.”
Workers in the Garbal call center in Niamey are able to review data to help herders.
HANNAH RAE ARMSTRONG
Garbal’s work comes down to data and, critically, who should have access to it. Recent advances in data collection—both from geosatellites and from herders themselves—have generated an abundance of information on ground cover quantity and quality, water availability, rain forecasts, livestock concentrations, and more. The resulting breakthroughs in forecasting can, in theory, help people anticipate—and protect herds from—droughts and other crises. But Orenstein believes it is not enough to extract data from herders, as has been the focus of numerous efforts over the past decade. It must be distributed to them.
The work couldn’t be more urgent. The region’s herders face an existential crisis that has already started to shred the very fabric of society.
Herding—prestigious, high risk, and one of humanity’s most foundational ways of life—is a pillar of survival in the Sahel. In Niger, for instance, known across the continent for its succulent steak, animal production accounts for 40% of the agricultural GDP. Migratory herders usher between 70% and 90% of the cattle population between seasonal pastures, since they rarely own land. These pastoralists have historically relied on common resources, in coordination with local communities.
But the traditional ways are becoming next to impossible. The crisis stems, in part, from the changing climate: as the desert creeps south, and as the dry season stretches longer and the rains come in shorter and more volatile intervals, water, pasture, and other renewable resources are increasingly erratic. But the strain is also political: brutal fighting between pro-government forces and local groups with links to Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State has turned major transit hubs, cow superhighways, and wetlands into battlegrounds. Making matters worse, herders tend to be underrepresented within state institutions, whose land-use policies favor farmers, and overrepresented within jihadist groups, which appeal to this exclusion to draw recruits from herding communities. A common lack of schooling among children of herders further deepens this exclusion.
In their long journeys, herders sometimes drive cattle near or through urban land.
ALAMY
The result is that tens of millions of Sahelian herders who depend upon free movement are increasingly penned in. Things are especially dire for Fulani herders, who get scapegoated as troublemaking outsiders. So addressing the multidimensional crisis would not only help herders; it could remove an intractable driver of one of Africa’s worst wars.
“Ensuring that herders have land and water rights, and working out their access to these through dialogue, is an important part of the solution to conflict in the Sahel,” says Adam Higazi, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Nigeria’s Modibbo Adam University, whose 2018 report on pastoralism and conflict for the UN’s West Africa office remains a key reference in the field.
The question now is whether Garbal and a handful of other tech-driven projects can in fact deliver on promises to help stabilize herders experiencing rising precarity.
Aliou Samba Ba, who leads a regional pastoralist organization that has teamed up with Orenstein to get data to Senegalese herders, says he’s optimistic, largely because Orenstein is turning traditional interventions upside down: “We say he looks with the eye of the herder as well as with the eye of the satellite.”
When institutions fail
The Sahel stretches from Senegal’s Atlantic coastline across Africa to the Red Sea, bounded by the Sahara to the north and by verdant forests and savanna to the south. Much of the region has been ravaged by drought and insurgencies over the past few decades, but rural Senegal is still home to the types of spaces that herders elsewhere are fighting for: maintained, not overdetermined; protected, not overpoliced. There is climate change here, but no war.
Last September, I drove deep into the Ferlo, a pastoral reserve roughly the size of New Jersey, to meet with a Fulani herder named Salif Sow.
It was the height of the rainy season, and the Sahel was having a great one. The environment that greeted me was a miracle and a mirage—a desert burst into bloom. Tall, bony Fulani herders scrambled to keep up with throngs of lambs, goats, cows, and camels spread out over a seemingly infinite expanse of green grass and lushly foliated trees. The Ferlo was brimming with carefully maintained wells, abundantly filled seasonal ponds, and clearly marked pastoralist corridors, with the country’s biggest wholesale livestock market just a few hours’ ride by donkey cart. There were no paved roads, no commercial farmland, and no extremist recruiters for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Herders have to make complex calculations when choosing where to take their cows to wait out the dry season.
SVEN TORFINN/PANOS PICTURES/REDUX
Not that the herding was easy work. “A herder’s life is difficult,” Sow said, welcoming me to his compound with sweet tea and a calabash filled with fresh milk. “There is not one day of rest.”
In a few months’ time, the rains would stop, the herds would exhaust the pastures, and the grassland would revert back to desert. And Sow would again face the difficult decision he faces every year: whether to stay and buy livestock feed to tide his animals over until next year’s rains or to lead his cows on a journey, and if so, where.
A lot of complex spatial calculations go into choosing where to take hundreds of hungry cows to wait out the dry season on the edge of the world’s largest subtropical desert, while making sure they have enough to eat along the way. Observing these deliberations filled Orenstein with wonder more than a decade ago, when he started surveying herders in Chad for a food security project with the French NGO Action Against Hunger (ACF).
In 2014, Orenstein helped ACF develop an early-warning system, mining new data sources using remote sensing—observing the conditions of grazing pastures from space via satellite imagery and, in some cases, with the use of drones. He also worked with pastoralist organizations to gather information about diverse conditions on the ground, ranging from wildfire locations to the spread of animal disease. He then began making maps using open-access sources; passing the data through an algorithm that he developed to treat and filter imagery, he created detailed and accessible illustrations of rainfall levels and vegetation that became a rare reliable resource for herders and their allies. Aid workers in war zones would print out his maps and pass them around to herders.
It was part of a system designed to extract data, analyze it, and send it up the chain to institutions, including national ministries, UN agencies, and donors. Being able to see crises coming, the thinking went, would give institutional actors more time and power to prepare their response and assign their resources. Being able to deploy emergency programming earlier would in turn afford herders a bit more protection.
In practice, that’s not always how it worked.
At the start of the rainy season in the early summer of 2017, Orenstein was tracking rainfall patterns and felt a knot in his stomach. The first rains had hit too hard, washing the dormant seeds out of the soil; a dry spell followed that lasted for several weeks. When the rains did return, the grassland growth was stunted. Drought was coming.
By mid-August, Orenstein was scribbling reports and ringing journalists to warn that disaster was imminent. But when presented with this evidence, the regional body with the authority to declare an emergency did not act. By the time it finally did, in April 2018—eight months after initial warnings were sounded—it was far too late to respond effectively to what turned out to be the worst drought in 20 years.
Data scientist Alex Orenstein marks up areas during a field mapping exercise.
COURTESY OF ALEX ORENSTEIN
Two months after that, in June 2018, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs urgently warned that 1.6 million children faced severe acute malnutrition, up more than 50% from the previous year.
That blighted season was also brutal for Sow. In March, his entire village sent its animals south to escape the drought—the first time anyone could remember doing so that early in the dry season. But Sow lingered, unwilling to take his sons out of school to help him. Nonetheless, he also could not afford to stay and buy several tons of animal feed per month at inflated prices. By the time Sow finally hired a few assistants and headed south with his cattle, sands had engulfed the grasslands.
They marched across the desert like soldiers at war, covering 18 miles a day. On the 10th day, they reached the Tambacounda region by the Malian border, where the cows would spend the rest of the lean season grazing on savanna woodlands and lush forest. Not all the herd survived the trek, and the cows that did were emaciated and more prone to insect-borne tropical diseases. By season’s end, a quarter of the herd had dropped dead—a defeat from which Sow still hasn’t recovered.
Democratizing data
Driving through the Ferlo in 2018, Orenstein was distraught to see the rail-thin Fulani herders trailing behind their withering cows. Across the Sahel, anti-Fulani pogroms were on the rise; some West Africans were taking to Twitter to call for their extermination. As weather, food, and protection systems broke down, it was easier to scapegoat the drifting “foreigner” than to demand accountability from anyone responsible.
The combination of starvation and ethnic massacres reminded Orenstein of the stories his grandfather used to tell of surviving Auschwitz. What good were early warnings if institutions were not willing to act on them? Not that the drought could have been prevented. But declaring an emergency sooner would have facilitated measures to soften its impact on herders. For example, governments could have sent cash transfers and distributed food for both humans and livestock at strategic transit locations.
From that point on, Orenstein decided to do things differently. If institutions could not be trusted to make good use of new data, why not get it directly to herders?
But delivering data to herders would prove extremely challenging. The centralized, vertically oriented systems traditionally used for data collection and analysis are better adapted to those institutions, usually located in capital cities, than to herders dispersed across thousands of miles of desert. What’s more, Sahelian herders are some of the world’s least reachable, least connected people. Many of them don’t have cell phones or access to internet or strong cellular service.
Still, the timing was good—aid workers and donors were increasingly hopeful that technology could solve stubborn problems. In 2018, Orenstein secured a $250,000 grant for ACF to broadcast data reports to herders in northern Senegal via text message and community radio.
The project launched several months later, though by then Orenstein was already working on another one: the Garbal call centers. Even more than community radio, the call centers, which are a collaboration with the Netherlands Development Organization, could offer data tailored to individuals in very specific locations over a wider remit. The first center launched in Bamako, Mali, in 2018. Another, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, followed in 2019.
Orenstein and the Garbal team—roughly a dozen local data analysts, project managers, digital finance experts, and tele-agents with degrees in livestock management and applied agriculture—have designed different tools for herders’ needs. For example, they’ve offered ways to connect with veterinarians, compare market prices for animal feed, and use satellite data to find seasonal migration corridors and track brushfires. Crucially, the team has also engaged directly with pastoralist organizations, training and equipping herders to send back field data about vegetation quality in different zones—a piece of critical information that is undetectable via satellite.
A screenshot of a tool developed by Orenstein and others that is used by call center agents to provide location-specific data to herders.
Orenstein himself went into the field as often as he could to hold focus groups with herders and ensure that the way information was delivered would be adapted to their epistemic culture. “Instead of asking them, ‘Do you need rainfall information?’ I would say, ‘What kind of information do you need? And how do you measure it?’” he recalls. “Otherwise, the system would tell them to expect 25 millimeters of rain. Math is not how they measure. So instead, I would hold consultations on pond fullness, for example, and define rain strength in those terms—terms they can use.”
Samba Ba, the Senegalese herder, notes how effective this work has been in bridging the gulf between what tech had promised and what he and his peers actually needed. “Orenstein would help us forecast in September what the vegetation would be like the following year, so we could plan the next seasonal migration,” he says. “He came to us in the field, took into account our customs, habits, and knowledge, and used technology to give us a clearer idea of the grazing situation.”
Still, the most popular Garbal service has been its weather forecasting for rural zones. Previously, reliable information was severely lacking, in part because there were not enough ground stations and in part because satellite data was available only for urban areas. (Mali, for instance, has just 13 active weather stations, compared with 200 in Germany—a country one-third its size.)
Orenstein came up with a way to make rural forecasts more readily available. “We had the coordinates for every village in Burkina Faso. Why couldn’t we just plug those into an API?” he remembers thinking, referring to an application programming interface, a kind of intermediary that allows applications to interact with one another. “Suddenly, we were getting weather forecasts for places that weren’t listed anywhere.”
The API has enabled Garbal tele-agents to click on remote pastoral zones on a map and receive tables showing weekly, daily, and hourly forecasts that are updated with fresh satellite data every three hours. Honoré Zidouemba, the project manager for the Ouagadougou call center, estimates that during the rainy season, his center receives 2,000 to 3,000 calls a day about the weather. “Herders and farmers used to derive information from natural cues,” he says, “but with climate change, those are more and more perturbed.”
A tool created by Orenstein and collaborators allows a user to highlight the presence of active cropland across time.
It’s simple and inexpensive—costing under $100 a month to use—but of all the team’s technological innovations, the API has made the biggest impact. It’s a far cry from the kinds of higher-tech applications NGOs and development organizations have been promoting.
Since 2015, the World Bank has committed half a billion dollars to a two-phase project to support Sahelian herders’ “resilience” through strategies that include developing technological tools to map pastoral infrastructure. A senior humanitarian-agency staffer working with herders and technology, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, says the resulting databases have not been shared with herders; he calls the approach, which is geared more toward informing institutions than informing herders, “very technocratic.” (The World Bank did not respond to a request for comment.)
Meanwhile, ACF, the French NGO Orenstein previously worked with, got international attention in 2020 for reportedly using AI to help herders, a claim several people involved in the project say was simply incorrect. (“ACF does not use self-learning for its Pastoral Early Warning System. Presently, the analysis is done ‘manually’ by human expertise,” says Erwann Fillol, a data analysis expert at the organization.)
Climate change is making herding routes, like this one across the Niger River, increasingly volatile.
ALAMY
Other groups are experimenting with using predictive analytics to forecast displacements and herders’ movements. A pilot project from the Danish Refugee Council in Burkina Faso, for example, predicts subnational displacement three to four months into the future, allowing aid workers to pre-position relief. “Anticipatory action in response to climate hazards can be more timely, dignified, and cost effective than alternatives,” says Alexander Kjaerum, an expert on data and predictive analytics with the organization. “AI is a last option when other things fail. And then it does add value.”
Still, some argue these kinds of projects have missed the point. “How are high technology and AI going to address land access issues for pastoralists? It is questionable if there are technological fixes to what are political, socioeconomic, and ecological pressures,” says Higazi, the pastoralist expert.
Blama Jalloh, a herder from Burkina Faso who heads the influential regional pastoralist organization Billital Maroobé, echoes this broad sentiment, arguing that big-budget, high-tech efforts mainly just produce studies, not innovation.
Taking matters into its own hands, in 2022 Billital Maroobé organized the first hackathon designed by and for Sahelian herders. Jalloh says the hackathon aimed to narrow the gap between herders and tech developers who lack familiarity with herding lifestyles. It granted up to $8,000 to startups from Mauritania and Mali to track animals and introduce digital ID cards for herders, which could help them cross borders more seamlessly.
An uncertain future
With three call centers now open, and Orenstein serving as a remote technical advisor from the US, the Garbal team is striving to stay focused and make their work sustainable.
Nevertheless, the fate of the project is far beyond its supporters’ control. The region’s slide into violence shows no sign of stopping. As a result, even though more of the herders that Garbal set out to support have started carrying smartphones charged with battery packs, they are increasingly being pushed out of cell range.
Protesters fill the streets of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, where nearly 10% of the population has been displaced in recent years.
AP IMAGES
Between 2018 and 2022, Burkina Faso witnessed one of the world’s fastest-growing displacement crises, with the number of internally displaced people exploding from 50,000 to 1.8 million—almost 10% of the population. Fulanis in particular were targeted for killing by security forces and government-backed vigilantes, and in some areas that are home to significant Fulani herding communities, militants destroyed as many as half the mobile-phone antennas. One tele-agent says the herders who did manage to call in from war zones told her how happy they were to reach the center. When I visited the Ouagadougou call center last year, a tele-agent named Dousso, a 24-year-old with a livestock degree who speaks French, Gourmantche, Dioula, and Moré, told me that “all of the coups,” as well as incidents in which jihadists took over markets, were also making it increasingly difficult to get certain types of data.
This can make the service even more meaningful where it’s still available, says Catherine Le Come, a Garbal cofounder, pointing to Mali, where Garbal is still accessible in some parts of the country that are now cut off from the state.
Yet Garbal, just like other efforts to get data to herders, faces the always pressing issue of how to fund this work consistently over time.
Nonprofit projects like ACF’s community radio and SMS bulletin alerts are pegged to funding cycles that run out after a few years. In March 2021, for instance, as Sow marched his cows 140 miles east toward the Senegal River, he relied on geospatial data he received by community radio and text message from two different NGOs, informing him where pastures were plentiful. But just three months later, both projects ran out of money and stopped supplying information.
Traditionally, Sahelian herders have been some of the least-connected individuals. But now more are carrying smartphones charged by battery packs.
THOMAS GRABKA/LAIF/REDUX
The Garbal call centers are trying to build a more sustainable model. The plan is to phase out NGO sponsorship by 2026 and operate as a public-private partnership between the state and telephone operators. Garbal charges callers a modest fee—the equivalent of five cents a minute—and has plans to roll out online marketplaces and financial products to generate revenue.
“Technology in itself has lots of potential,” says Le Come. “But it is the private sector that must believe and invest in innovation. And the risks it faces innovating in a context as fragile as the Sahel must be shared with a public sector that sees user impact.” (Cedric Bernard, a French agro-economist who has worked with ACF, firmly disagrees; he insists that the information should be free, and that trying to be profitable “is going the wrong way.”) Furthermore, the for-profit model means that Garbal—which set out to help vulnerable herders—is already pivoting toward providing services to farmers, who make more reliable customers because they are easier to reach and better connected. Zidouemba, the Ouagadougou project manager, says that its callers are now overwhelmingly farmers; herders, he estimates, account for just 20% of the calls to the Burkina Faso center.
In 2018, a quarter of Salif Sow’s herd dropped dead in a severe drought. But that season he made a sacrifice that is finally paying off: His son recently started studying abroad in Paris.
HANNAH RAE ARMSTRONG
As the tides of data that reach them ebb and flow, the herders themselves are aware that the real work needed to keep their way of life going is a longer-term political effort. As I prepared to leave the Ferlo this fall, the landscape still resplendent from the rainy season, Sow pulled me aside. He was a modest man, but there was something he wanted me to know. That very night, he said shyly, his eldest son, Abdoulsalif, was leaving Dakar for Paris to begin graduate studies at the Sorbonne, where he had received a scholarship—a fruit of the sacrifice that Sow made during the year of the terrible drought.
I reached Abdoulsalif over WhatsApp a few weeks later, by which time he had learned that Sciences Po was more prestigious than the Sorbonne and enrolled there instead. He is studying public policy and plans to seek work on pastoralist policy in the Sahel after graduation.
“Herding is a beautiful way of life, a space where I feel very happy,” Abdoulsalif told me. “It is extraordinary to see, so far away, the animals in their vast spaces. Far more beautiful than to live in a place with four walls. Even in Paris, I feel nostalgic for this life, this space of herders.”
Hannah Rae Armstrong is a writer and policy adviser on the Sahel and North Africa. She lives in Dakar, Senegal.
Note: PLOS is delighted to once again partner with the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. The awards program honors researchers who reflect rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency in their work. The Einstein Foundation received dozens of stellar submissions. We asked this year’s finalists to write about their research in the run up to the ceremony on March 14th in Berlin. This is the third blog in our 5-part series.
Author: See complete bios at the end of this blog.
The Global South, comprising a majority of the world’s population, lives in knowledge production ecosystems which are not fully captured in formal institutions. Universities are not necessarily at the heart of knowledge creation in the South. Academic institutions often suffer from political capture, limited academic freedom, resource constraints and little access-to-networks to develop long term research expertise. Much of the knowledge mobilization happens outside the academe–through actors like nonprofits, think tanks, activists, local communities, and social movement activists. Much of this knowledge remains disaggregated, inaccessible and anecdotal. The net result then is its unrecognized potential for building general models for understanding the world, and longer gestation period for existing models to translate into policy action.
If one considers for instance, informal markets. More than 90 percent of Indian workforce is informal in nature, and yet, the modern economics is built around the assumption of formal contract and property rights in place, with informal contracts relegated to some footnotes, rendering invisible much of what the Global South studies experiences in their day-to-day experience. Consider another instance of programs for economic reform and debts. The bulk of the university or institutional top down research tends to focus on macroeconomic implications and ignore household debts. For many borrowers, loan recovery is done through the full force of criminal laws, something expressly prohibited under the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights. Yet countries as diverse as India, Nigeria and Egypt all lean on similar approaches to debt recovery–with women being particularly disadvantaged. A third example includes knowledge production around Climate Change. It is an intensely political subject in some Global North contexts such as the USA; and globally, Climate Change is enmeshed with democratic and other social movements. . Studying its effects, therefore, cuts across disciplines, and the formal and informal divide of where knowledge is located. The absence of frameworks to holistically understand the Global South experiences leads to knowledge production models and systems with hugely inefficient outcomes. Focusing solely on the the university-centric model, therefore, gives us an incomplete picture.
Our project studies and aims to offer a comprehensive global platform and network to unify some of the different sites through which knowledge is produced, mobilized and disseminated in the South. Academics in the South wear multiple hats – they work in traditional research spaces but also practice and connect with local knowledge centers, activists and community actors and organizations, and even governments. The overlaps and exchanges between these actors generate knowledge, mobilize it, and drive calls to action. These knowledge stakeholders could be called as scholactivists. They innovate models of knowledge production and mobilization by integrating or strengthening the links between formal knowledge and the tacit knowledge gained through experience of actors on the ground.
We propose to work through a range of methods to build knowledge/data from the ground up through the local/informal sites of knowledge production and connect them to formal institutional networks. There is a need to introduce diverse and plural perspectives into the mainstream and dominant knowledge models. The dominant model of knowledge creation has indeed been built around assumptions about a simple transfer from North to South. This approach pushes formal models that work in the North, into the South for reform projects without taking into consideration context, culture, history and politics. The Global South, therefore, provides fertile grounds to study how we can unify knowledge systems and make them more resilient in larger and real-world contexts. The project is therefore about recognizing the plural sites of knowledge production, something that will integrate and transform knowledge globally.
The project has two components, namely (a) curation (with online repository, regulatory mapping, and resources for scholars at risk), and (b) research component (with global and regional workshop and supporting communities within and outside academia). One of our hopes is that this project helps build legacies and shapes alternative futures. In the Global South, where we are claiming knowledge resides in the intersection of overlapping, dynamic and often informal fields, legacy building becomes challenging. Knowledge is neither systematized, nor institutionalized, or carried forth. Building knowledge systems takes generations and the task ahead of us is intergenerational to build knowledge commons and reinforce the power of community.
Dr. Cynthia Farid is currently a Global Academic Fellow at the University of Hong Kong Law Faculty. She is also a member of the Global Young Academy, and a lawyer at the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. She has longstanding experience in research, legal practice, law reform, and a range of rule-of-law programming with INGOs, think tanks, and legal rights organizations. Her research interests include constitutional law, legal history, law and development, and knowledge production processes in the Global South. She is the organizer of two International Research Collaboratives at the Law and Society Association, USA that focus on South Asian Legal Systems, and Scholactivism in the Global South. These collaboratives have facilitated collaboration between researchers from around the world, particularly those located in the Global South.
Yugank Goyal is associate professor in FLAME University (India) where is founder-director of Centre for Knowledge Alternatives. The Centre is pioneering large-scale documentation of district-level statistics and cultures across India.
His research interests include regulation, law and development, institutional economics, knowledge systems, informal markets and psephology. His research has been published in high-impact journals. He is also a reviewer in several of them. He also regularly contributes to national dailies and other popular fora as well.
He enjoys teaching interdisciplinary subjects, including public policy, new institutional economics, law and economics, futures studies and ethics.
Yugank engages with the government on public policy issues regularly. He is Member, National Education Policy (NEP) Steering Committee, government of Maharashtra, Regional Advisory Council Member, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, government of India, and Consultant, Procurement Research Cell, AJ National Institute of Financial Management. He sits on the academic board of the Indian School of Public Policy, which he helped set up. Recently, he sldo co-founded a philanthropic, crowdfunded school in rural, western UP.
Dr. Sergio Latorre is Assistant Professor in the School of Law at the Universidad del Norte. He has an LLM and JSD from Cornell University. Before starting his postgraduate studies, he served with the Jesuit Refugee Service, working with internally displaced communities in different regions in Colombia. Sergio is interested in exploring innovative approaches toward bridging gaps between law and local cultures and communities, in particular rural peasants (campesino) communities victims of violence and land dispossession in the region of Montes de Maria (northern rural Colombia), where he has done extensive fieldwork research in the past 14 years. His research concerns the resolution of land tenure disputes and engages with debates on property, bureaucracy, transitional justice, international environmental law and peace.
Full-time Commissioner of the South African Human Rights Commission
Commissioner Tshepo Madlingozi studied law and sociology in South Africa, Cameroon, and the United Kingdom. Before being appointed to the Commission, he was the Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at WITS University and an Associate Professor at the same university where he taught human rights and social justice. He has been a consultant for local organisations and inter-governmental organisations including the Pan-African Parliament and the U.N. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Dr. Suraj Yengde is currently a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University. His prior appointments were Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and was part of the founding team of the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. Dr. Suraj Yengde is also a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He is an International Human Rights attorney by qualification from India and the UK and a transnational Dalit rights activist involved in building solidarities between Dalit, Black, Roma, Indigenous, Buraku and Refugee peoples in the Fourth World project of marginalized peoples. Currently, he is involved in developing a critical theory of Dalit and Black Studies.
How scientists are using quantum squeezing to push the limits of their sensors
When two black holes spiral inward and collide, they shake the very fabric of space, producing ripples in space-time that can travel for hundreds of millions of light-years. Since 2015, scientists have been observing these so-called gravitational waves to help them study fundamental questions about the cosmos, including the origin of heavy elements such as gold and the rate at which the universe is expanding.
But detecting gravitational waves isn’t easy. By the time they reach Earth, the ripples have dissipated into near silence. Our detectors must sense motions on the scale of one ten-thousandth the width of a proton to stand a chance. And making them more sensitive is a huge challenge. Physicists say a new approach could help: quantum squeezing.
The technique could also help create more precise magnetometers, gyroscopes, and clocks with potential applications for navigation. Creators of commercial and military technology have begun dabbling in quantum squeezing, too: the Canadian startup Xanadu uses it in its quantum computers, and last fall, DARPA announced Inspired, a program for developing quantum squeezing technology on a chip. Find out more.
—Sophia Chen
Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario-like games from scratch
The news: OpenAI’s stunning generative model Sora is pushing the envelope of what’s possible with text-to-video. Now, Google DeepMind is bringing us text-to-video games.
How it works: The new model, called Genie, can take a short description, a hand-drawn sketch or a photo and turn it into a playable video game in the style of classic 2D platformers like Super Mario Bros. But don’t expect anything fast-paced. The games run at one frame per second, compared to the typical 30-60 frames per second of most modern games.
Why it matters: While Genie won’t be released, it could one day be turned into a game-making tool. It could also potentially help advance the field of robotics. Read the full story.
“It’s cool work,” says Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher at the University of Alberta, who developed a similar game generator a few years ago.
Genie was trained on 30,000 hours of video of hundreds of 2D platform games taken from the internet. Others have taken that approach before, says Guzdial. His own game generator learned from videos to create abstract platformers. Nvidia used video data to train a model called GameGAN, which could produce clones of games like Pac-Man.
But all these examples trained the model with input actions (such as button presses on a controller), as well as video footage: a video frame showing Mario jumping was paired with the Jump action, and so on. Tagging video footage with input actions takes a lot of work, which has limited the amount of training data available.
In contrast, Genie was trained on video footage alone. It then learned which of eight possible actions would cause the game character in a video to change its position. This turned countless hours of existing online video into potential training data.
Genie can generate simple games from hand-drawn sketches
GOOGLE DEEPMIND
Genie generates each new frame of the game on the fly depending on the action the player takes. Press Jump, and Genie updates the current image to show the game character jumping; press Left and the image changes to show the character moved to the left. The game ticks along action by action, each new frame generated from scratch as the player plays.
Future versions of Genie could run faster. “There is no fundamental limitation that prevents us from reaching 30 frames per second,” says Tim Rocktäschel, a research scientist at Google DeepMind who leads the team behind the work. “Genie uses many of the same technologies as contemporary large language models, where there has been significant progress in improving inference speed.”
Genie learned some common visual quirks found in platformers. Many games of this type use parallax, where the foreground moves sideways faster than the background. Genie often adds this effect to the games it generates.
While Genie is an in-house research project and won’t be released, Guzdial notes that the Google DeepMind team says it could one day be turned into a game-making tool—something he’s working on too. “I’m definitely interested to see what they build,” he says.
In background conversations, several industry insiders I’ve spoken with acknowledge that the number of carbon removal companies is simply unsustainable, and that a sizable share will flame out at some point.
The sector has taken off, in part, because a growing body of studies has found that a huge amount of carbon removal will be needed to keep rising temperatures in check. By some estimates, nations may have to remove 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by midcentury to keep the planet from blowing past 2 °C of warming, or to pull it back into safer terrain.
On top of that, companies are looking for ways to meet their net-zero commitments. For now, some businesses are willing to pay the really high current costs for carbon removal, in part to help the sector scale up. These include Microsoft and companies participating in the $1 billion Frontier program.
At the moment, I’m told, corporate demand is outstripping the availability of reliable forms of carbon removal. There are only a handful of direct-air-capture plants, which take years to construct, and companies are still testing out or scaling up other approaches, like burying biochar and pumping bio-oil deep underground.
Costs are sure to come down, but it’s always going to be relatively expensive to do this well, and there are only so many corporate customers that will be willing to pay the true cost, observers say. So as carbon removal capacity catches up with that corporate demand, the fate of the industry will increasingly depend on how much more help governments are willing to provide—and on how thoughtfully they craft any accompanying rules.
Countries may support the emerging industry through carbon trading markets, direct purchases, mandates on polluters, fuel standards, or other measures.
It seems safe to assume that nations will continue to dangle more carrots or wield bigger sticks to help the sector along. Notably, the European Commission is developing a framework for certifying carbon dioxide removal, which could allow countries to eventually use various approaches to work toward the EU goal of climate neutrality by 2050. But it’s far from clear that such government support will grow as much and as quickly as investors hope or as entrepreneurs need.
Indeed, some observers argue it’s a “fantasy” that nations will ever fund high-quality carbon removal—on the scale of billions of tons a year—just because climate scientists said they should (see: our decades of inaction on climate change). To put it in perspective, the DCVC report notes that removing 100 billion tons at $100 a ton would add up to $10 trillion—“more than a tenth of global GDP.”
The overarching message from this research is that plans among corporate leaders to disrupt competition using the new technology—rather than being disrupted–—may founder on a host of challenges that many executives appear to underestimate.
Executives expect generative AI to disrupt industries across economies. Overall, six out of 10 respondents agree that “generative AI technology will substantially disrupt our industry over the next five years.” Respondents that foresee disruption exceed those that do not across every industry.
A majority of respondents do not envision AI disruption as a risk; instead, they hope to be disruptors. Rather than being concerned about risk, 78% see generative AI as a competitive opportunity. Just 8% regard it as a threat. Most respondents hope to be disruptors: 65% say their businesses are “actively considering new and innovative ways to use generative AI to unlock hidden opportunities from our data.”
Despite expectations of change, few companies went beyond experimentation with, or limited adoption of, generative AI in 2023. Although most (76%) companies surveyed had worked with generative AI in some way in 2023, few (9%) adopted the technology widely. Those that used the technology experimented with or deployed it in only one or a few limited areas.
Companies have ambitious plans to increase adoption in 2024. Respondents expect the number of functions where they aim to deploy generative AI to more than double in 2024. This will involve frequent application of the technology in customer experience, strategic analysis, and product innovation.
Companies need to address IT deficiencies, or risk falling short of their ambitions to deploy generative AI, leaving them open to disruption. Fewer than 30% of respondents rank each of eight IT attributes at their companies as conducive to rapid adoption of generative AI. Those with the most experience of deploying generative AI have less confidence in their IT than their peers.
Non-IT factors also undermine the successful use of generative AI. Survey respondents also report non-IT impediments to the extensive use of generative AI. These factors include regulatory risk, budgets, the competitive environment, culture, and skills.
Executives expect generative AI to provoke a wave of disruption. In many cases, however, their hopes to be on the right side of this innovation are endangered by impediments that their companies do not fully appreciate.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
LIGO has confirmed 90 gravitational wave detections so far, but physicists want to detect more, which will require making the experiment even more sensitive. And that is a challenge.
“The struggle of these detectors is that every time you try to improve them, you actually can make things worse, because they are so sensitive,” says Lisa Barsotti, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Nevertheless, Barsotti and her colleagues recently pushed past this challenge, creating a device that will allow LIGO’s detectors to detect far more black hole mergers and neutron star collisions. The device belongs to a growing class of instruments that use quantum squeezing—a practical way for researchers dealing with systems that operate by the fuzzy rules of quantum mechanics to manipulate those phenomena to their advantage.
Physicists describe objects in the quantum realm in terms of probabilities—for example, an electron is not located here or there but has some likelihood of being in each place, locking into one only when its properties are measured. Quantum squeezing can manipulate the probabilities, and researchers are increasingly using it to exert more control over the act of measurement, dramatically improving the precision of quantum sensors like the LIGO experiment.
“In precision sensing applications where you want to detect super-small signals, quantum squeezing can be a pretty big win,” says Mark Kasevich, a physicist at Stanford University who applies quantum squeezing to make more precise magnetometers, gyroscopes, and clocks with potential applications for navigation. Creators of commercial and military technology have begun dabbling in the technique as well: the Canadian startup Xanadu uses it in its quantum computers, and last fall, DARPA announced Inspired, a program for developing quantum squeezing technology on a chip. Let’s take a look at two applications where quantum squeezing is already being used to push the limits of quantum systems.
Taking control of uncertainty
The key concept behind quantum squeezing is the phenomenon known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. In a quantum-mechanical system, this principle puts a fundamental limit on how precisely you can measure an object’s properties. No matter how good your measurement devices are, they will suffer a fundamental level of imprecision that is part of nature itself. In practice, that means there’s a trade-off. If you want to track a particle’s speed precisely, for example, then you must sacrifice precision in knowing its location, and vice versa. “Physics imposes limits on experiments, and especially on precision measurement,” says John Robinson, a physicist at the quantum computing startup QuEra.
By “squeezing” uncertainty into properties they aren’t measuring, however, physicists can gain precision in the property they want to measure. Theorists proposed using squeezing in measurement as early as the 1980s. Since then, experimental physicists have been developing the ideas; over the last decade and a half, the results have matured from sprawling tabletop prototypes to practical devices. Now the big question is what applications will benefit. “We’re just understanding what the technology might be,” says Kasevich. “Then hopefully our imagination will grow to help us find what it’s really going to be good for.”
Founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899, MIT Technology Review is a world-renowned, independent media company whose insight, analysis, reviews, interviews and live events explain the newest technologies and their commercial, social and political impact.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Introducing: the Hidden Worlds issue
A hidden world is fundamentally different from the undiscovered. We know the hidden world is there. We just can’t see it or reach it.
Hidden worlds exist in the great depths of the ocean and high above us in the planets of the night sky. But they are also all around us in the form of waves and matter and microbes.
Technology has long played the spoiler to these worlds in hiding. We have used ships, airplanes, and rockets to shrink distances. Telescopes, cameras, satellites, drones, and radar help us peer into and map the places we cannot go ourselves. AI increasingly plays a role, too.
If this all fascinates you as much as us, you’ll love the latest issue of MIT Technology Review. It’s all about using technology to explore and expose those hidden worlds, whether they are in the ocean depths, in the far reaches of our galaxy, or swirling all around us, unseen.
Check out these stories from the magazine:
+ Why Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, is being investigated as a potential host for life.
+ Meet the intrepid divers experimenting with breathing hydrogen as part of an effort to reach depths no diver has ever been before.
+ Inside the hunt for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider, which hasn’t seen any new particles since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
+ As AI develops at breakneck speed, this comic explains what we can all learn from the Luddites.
+ Here’s a job title you perhaps haven’t heard before, but will hear more in future: climate equity specialist.
This is just a small selection of what’s on offer. I urge you to dive in and enjoy the whole thing, when you find the time. Enjoy!
The first-ever mission to pull a dead rocket out of space has just begun
More than 9,000 metric tons of human-made metal and machinery are orbiting Earth, including satellites, shrapnel, and the International Space Station. But a significant bulk of that mass comes from one source: the nearly a thousand dead rockets that have been discarded in space since the space age began.
Now, for the first time, a mission has begun to remove one of those dead rockets. Funded by the Japanese space agency JAXA, it was launched on Sunday, February 18, and is currently on its way to rendezvous with such a rocket in the coming weeks.
It’ll inspect it and then work out how a follow-up mission might be able to pull the dead rocket back into the atmosphere. If it succeeds, it could demonstrate how we could remove large, dangerous, and uncontrolled pieces of space junk from orbit—objects that could cause a monumental disaster if they collided with satellites or spacecraft. Read the full story.
—Jonathan O’Callaghan
Why hydrogen is losing the race to power cleaner cars
Imagine a car that doesn’t emit any planet-warming gases—or any pollution at all, for that matter. Unlike the EVs on the roads today, it doesn’t take an hour or more to charge—just fuel up and go.
It sounds too good to be true, but it’s the reality of vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells. And almost nobody wants one.
Don’t get me wrong: hydrogen vehicles are sold around the world. But they appear to be lurching toward something of a dead end, with fuel prices going up, vehicle sales stagnating, and fueling stations shutting down. Read our story to find out why that is, and what we’d need to get these cars on the road.
—Casey Crownhart
The story above is for subscribers-only. But subscriptions start from just $8 a month to get access to all of MIT Technology Review’s award-winning journalism—why not try it out?
Why Chinese apps chose to film super-short soap operas in Southeast Asia
A handful of Chinese companies are betting that short videos can disrupt the movie and TV industry. These “soap operas for the TikTok age” have found a huge audience in China, creating a market worth $5 billion. Now, they’re betting that these shows, once adapted, can appeal to an American audience.
But rather than just jumping straight into the US, many of these firms are using Southeast Asia as both a testing ground, and a production hub. And they’re treading a well-worn path for using that region as the first frontier for expansion outside China. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter about China’s tech scene and how it interacts with the world. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Apple is killing its electric car project Execs say they’ll get the 2,000-odd employees working on it to focus on generative AI instead. (Bloomberg $) + This is why they axed it. (Wired $) + Despite never selling a single vehicle, Apple still managed to exert an impact on the car industry. (The Atlantic $)
2 Google’s big AI push is coming back to bite it The problems with generative AI keep being laid bare for all to see, in real time. (WSJ $) + Apple’s shareholders are trying to force it to be more transparent about the risks associated with AI. (FT $)
3 How the Pentagon uses targeted ads to find its targets Including Vladimir Putin. No, really. (Wired $) + Nowhere online is safe from ads these days. (The Atlantic $)
4 AI is coming for the porn industry But porn companies believe some people will pay a premium to interact with a real human being. (WP $)
5 An out-of-control fire is forcing mass evacuations in Texas It’s more than doubled in size since igniting on Monday afternoon. (CNN) + The quest to build wildfire-resistant homes. (MIT Technology Review)
6 A pharma company posted positive results for another weight loss drug Viking Therapeutics, a smaller player from San Diego, has joined the goldrush. (Quartz $) + These drugs are wildly popular and effective. But their long-term health impacts are still unknown. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Delivery drivers have to contend with off-the-charts air pollution It’s such a big problem in South Asia that some of them are forced to take sick days as a result. (Rest of World)
8 Crypto miners blocked legal efforts to reveal how much energy they use A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order which will prevent the Department of Energy from collecting the data. (The Verge) + Bitcoin’s value hit a two-year high. (Quartz)
9 Some advice: don’t use ChatGPT for your taxes Or, frankly, anything important. (CNET)
10 Want to feel sad? Ask TikTok how old you look I have… zero temptation to do this. (NYT $)
Quote of the day
“I feel so powerless in this state.”
—Lochrane Chase, a 36-year-old lifelong resident of Birmingham, Alabama, tells Wired how she’s having to put her plans to pursue IVF on hold due to the Alabama Supreme Court’s February 16 ruling, which stated that embryos are “unborn children.”
The big story
This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it.
MS TECH VIA STABLE DIFFUSION
September 2022
Greg Rutkowski is a Polish digital artist who uses classical painting styles to create dreamy fantasy landscapes. His distinctive illustration style has been used in some of the world’s most popular fantasy games, including Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.
Now he’s become a hit in the new world of text-to-image AI generation, becoming one of the most commonly used prompts in the open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion.
But this and other open-source programs are built by scraping images from the internet, often without permission and proper attribution to artists. As a result, they are raising tricky questions about ethics and copyright. And artists like Rutkowski have had enough. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ There are so many ways to say “drunk” in English. Drunkonyms, if you will. + Some amazing close-up photographs on display here. + Look after your joints, and they’ll look after you. + A philanthropist has donated $1 billion to ensure students at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx will get free tuition “in perpetuity.”
