A Solarpunk-compatible use of AI: using AI powered robots to fix the problem of sorting of recyclable materials from our waste stream
To reduce our impact on the earth, the correct order of priority is to reduce waste, reuse what we can, and then recycle. Washing and reusing a water bottle or a grocery bag will always be less energy intensive and less wasteful than melting it down / shredding it down to pulp to re-make another bottle or bag. But as long as we will have some form of waste, the problem of making recycling cost effective and thorough will be with us. One of the biggest problems facing the task of recycling is to correctly sort all the recyclables out of our trash, into their respective categories.
Sorting through waste is tedious and error prone drudgery, and is relatively low value work. Enough people are not conscientious about sorting their trash that we end up with recyclables in our trash and trash contaminating our recyclables. This is the perfect kind of job to automate with AI. This doesn't require massive resource-draining data centers; this just requires localized trained machine vision systems. It is also the kind of drudgery that people typically don't want to do if it were not paying sufficiently. I doubt any child dreams of being a trash sorter when they grow up.
With AI powered robots sorting through our trash, rates of recycling loss and rates of contamination (that can ruin entire batches of material at worst or lower the quality of recycled materials at best) can be reduced as low as possible.
IMHO, this is the sort of AI that should have been prioritized. Somehow we had to wait for this while AI ruined so many other things with catastrophic developments nobody was really asking for.
