At the recent science summit convened in Farmleigh House by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Patrick Donovan, participants responded with a mix of optimism but also concern as they outlined how current policy is short of what’s urgently needed.
Gathered were some of Ireland’s leading researchers, heads of science-related agencies – notably the new main funding body Research Ireland – and senior public servants. In essence, this was about the interface of science and policy; asking whether the right research is being pursued to ensure the best outcomes for citizens and country.
O’Donovan asked for “provocation” and frankness in the interests of ensuring a more robust long-term vision for Irish science. His request was responded to by speakers in a genuine way, not out of self-interest, but with the wish to ensure science-based actions meet obvious challenges but also avail of opportunities – with calls for funding carefully balanced between public good and applied research embracing industry needs.
Perhaps, the sharpest case for redirection came from climate scientist Prof Peter Thorne of Maynooth University, also co-chair of the All-Island Climate and Biodiversity Research Network, a growing community of practitioners on climate and biodiversity, acutely conscious that we face immense – and immediate – challenges.
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On why scaled-up, long-term collaborative research on climate-biodiversity is the overriding requirement, he highlighted current indications of what’s to come – and yet why Ireland is a position to respond appropriately.
“Ireland has among the highest per capita greenhouse emissions in Europe,” he said. “We put a small proportion of the total emissions into the atmosphere [0.1 per cent], but if every person in the globe had the historical emissions profile of Ireland, global mean temperature today would be north of 3 degrees. We have made an outsized contribution to the problem. Our infrastructure across the island cannot cope the impacts of climate extremes already; one of the things you need to bear in mind is climate extremes will increase very non-linearly.”
Where we are now is bad: 1.5 degrees above average global temperature in preindustrial times will be worse, 2 degrees will be “much, much, much worse, 3 will be unimaginably worse”.
The right action at scale is critical because of the extent of human-induced damage to the planet and overheating baked in for many decades to come. “Even if we reach globally net-zero carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions, all that does is stop the problem getting worse. It doesn’t magically return us to a pre-industrial climate. And remember, we have developed from hunter gatherers through agrarian, industrial and technological revolution in a period when climates varied by very, very little. Arguably, it is that stability in the climate that enabled us to develop and we’re now pushing way outside that.”
And we need to get a handle on this, especially when our biodiversity is so significantly degraded. “If we can’t solve these challenges, challenges on the island of Ireland, then where on earth can? We have a highly educated population. We have, fundamentally, the capital resource. We have the nimbleness, if it is our priority to act faster.”
[ Irish climate to become ‘unrecognisable’ if action on emissions is delayedOpens in new window ]
On a more positive note, we have immense potential to act effectively and the community of researchers has a real desire to work collaboratively, Prof Thorne said. But it needs “interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary research”, and not just the sciences. This is not being overly radical, as other countries are already taking such action, he said. “We can’t solve everything. So where should we put our effort? What are the potential problems that we have a unique capability in? What advances that we make would have the biggest global impact?”
Business as usual is not working. “We have 30-odd funders funding research in this climate-biodiversity space in a country of six maybe seven million. That’s madness.”
Furthermore, they almost entirely fund short-term grants, which beget issues of recruitment, training and retention. “Universities will not daisy chain postdocs together because they become contracts of indefinite duration ... So we train people fantastically, and then we throw them out the door.”
Big Science Foundation Ireland centres do fantastic things but are industry-focused, and sometimes industry-led, Prof Thorne said. Current funding mechanisms lead to intense competition, within and between institutions, which ends up with “cats fighting in a sack”.
Artificial Intelligence
Big opportunities will come from artificial intelligence (AI), once the huge energy demands of data centres is addressed, according to Prof Brian MacNamee of University College Dublin “The best poker player, the best radiologist, the best stock trader in the world, is not a person and it’s not an AI system. It’s a combination of the two working together,” he said.
[ Data centres now account for 21% of all electricity consumptionOpens in new window ]
Symbiotic systems leveraging the best of what people can do and the best of what computation can bring will be enormously effective. It’s about how we build them and give people the agency and control they should have. “If we want to have a sustainable AI future, we’re going to have to figure out ways to build AI systems that use less data, less computation, less low-end manual labour,” Prof MacNamee said.
Although embodied AI, like robotics, has lagged behind developments in software-based AI, “the gap is really closing at the moment ... we’re [soon] going to see a world where we coexist with delivery drones, self-driving cars, a whole host of other embodied AI systems. We have an onus on us now to try and imagine what that world is.”
Modern AI systems can empower and accelerate other sciences, he noted. Soon every scientist will have an AI tool, “working for them, working with them”. Every aspect of work, social action or community life will have AI systems working in the background.
“As we move into that world, just like we’ve moved into other technology revolutions, like the cars came along, electricity came along, the internet came along, we need to think really hard about how we live in that world and how we make those developments in AI, a net positive for people in society and avoiding some of the mistakes that have been made before.”
Ireland has been in AI for decades, is generating top AI scientists while Irish fingerprints are on many more recent big developments. Opportunity is enhanced by having so many data centres here. Having committed to a green agenda, “to an extent that allows us to come into this space.”
Echoing Thorne, he said that because of our size we have the opportunity to do big things as a country. We can talk to each other, to our policymakers, to our audiences; “you can find that person that you want to work with.”
This facilitates being a leader in specific areas of AI research. We can be “a demonstrator, a test bed” on how we bring this new technology to all different aspects of our lives and society “in a trustworthy, effective way”.
The rewards can be substantial, MacNamee predicted: “If we come together to do things at a national scale, the sort of flip side of that is, when we go out into the world, we’re a really significant player.”
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