How Can AI Help Us With What We Care About?

Take a look at the iPhone sitting in front of you. It arrived as a finished product to you on a container ship, but each element of its manufacture was also shipped in turn -- from crude oil deliveries to a refinery, to silicon for glassmakers and electronic components, and from ores to be processed into metals, to the wholesale transportation of wires, chips and plastics. The phone also needs to be charged: oil products or biomass are transported daily to power stations, generating the electricity through wires that run into your home -- themselves made of concrete, sand, wood, metal and ceramics. In fact, 90 percent of almost everything is transported by ship at some point. It is the backbone of the globalized, connected society we live in.