Global Courant
Amazon’s top technology official told the United Nations this week that people need to eat more fish and less beef if they want to protect the environment, saying artificial intelligence is a tool that is already helping to make that happen.
Dr. Werner Vogels, chief technology officer and vice president of Amazon, told the “AI for Good” world summit in Geneva this week that AI is helping rice farmers and other food producers around the world to be much more efficient. However, he said AI will also play an important role in ensuring that food is cheaper for the environment.
In his remarks to the conference on July 6, Vogels showed an image that said it takes seven times more feed to produce a given amount of protein from a livestock farm compared to a fish farm. He said this means people should stop eating beef.
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Amazon Chief Technology Officer and Vice President Dr. Werner Vogels said at a United Nations conference on artificial intelligence on July 6 that saving the environment means people will have to eat less beef and more fish. (Fox News/Screenshot)
“We have to shift the protein,” Vogels said. “And we know … how detrimental livestock farming is, not only because of the amount of food it needs, but also because of the impact it has on the environment.”
“If we want to reduce that impact, we need to move to consuming fish as our main source of protein,” he said.
Shifting that drastically to fish requires more efficient fish farms. Today, he said, fish farms are plagued with diseases that can spread too quickly to all the fish in the same pen.
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Dr. Werner Vogels said AI is already being used to make fish farms more effective and make it easier for fish to replace beef. (Fox News/Screen Shot)
However, he said AI is already helping to solve that problem. Vogels said companies like Aquabyte are using AI and machine learning to collect data on fish to quickly detect the presence of disease and other problems that hurt yields.
“Their mission is to improve fish farming techniques,” he said. “They’re building this very unique camera… to identify the individual fish, to identify their growth, to identify potential diseases.”
He said AI systems have already analyzed more than 1 billion fish, allowing these systems to create a huge library of fish data that will make it more efficient to track farmed fish as they grow.
Vogels added that farmed fish is a necessary step, as fishing from the ocean has also been shown to be bad for the environment.
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Dr. Werner Vogels said that ocean fishing is also not environmentally friendly, which is why AI-controlled fish farms are needed. (Fox News/Screen Shot)
“This is an extremely harmful industry,” he said at the UN meeting. “Greenpeace reports that fishing nets are responsible for about 86% of the large plastic waste caught in the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Dump’, which is located in the Pacific Ocean, which is three times the size of France.”
“It’s extremely damaging — current fishing approaches — to the environment,” he said. “So fish farming is a much better controlled environment to raise fish.”
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The UN conference ran from July 6 to 7 and featured top UN officials and industry leaders. On July 6, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the public that while AI has the potential for “enormous good”, it also carries potential dangers, “from the development and use of autonomous lethal weapons to turbo-charged charge of mis- and disinformation that has undermined democracy.”
Pete Kasperowicz is a political editor at Fox News Digital.
