Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping prevent overfishing in a bid to protect the world's rapidly dwindling supply of edible marine species. A new project uses AI to improve the identification and measurement of fish species in Africa's Nile Basin. The software can help scientists understand fish population density more quickly than human observers. It's part of a larger effort to harness AI to improve sustainability across a wide range of industries. "The promising thing about AI is that it now allows us to do tasks that would be time-consuming or impossibly complex using traditional methods, with considerably more speed and efficiency," Andrew Dunckelman, head of impact and insights at Google.org, the search giant's charitable arm, told Lifewire in an email interview.

For centuries, cities in the United States used an inexpensive, malleable, and leak-resistant material for constructing their water pipes: lead. Today, the health risks posed by lead pipes are well-known. Drinking lead-contaminated water can stunt children's development and cause heart and kidney problems among adults.¹ The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned the use of lead pipes for new construction in 1986. Yet, today, lead services lines (the pipes that take water from city lines into individual homes) are still prevalent across the country.

More than six years after residents of Flint, Michigan, suffered widespread lead poisoning from their drinking water, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to improve water quality and bolster the city's economy. But residents still report a type of community PTSD, waiting in long grocery store lines to stock up on bottled water and filters. Media reports Wednesday said former governor Rick Snyder has been charged with neglect of duty for his role in the crisis. Snyder maintains his innocence, but he told Congress in 2016, "Local, state and federal officials--we all failed the families of Flint." One tool that emerged from the crisis is a form of artificial intelligence that could prevent similar problems in other cities where lead poisoning is a serious concern.

William Isaac is a senior research scientist on the ethics and society team at DeepMind, an AI startup that Google acquired in 2014. I asked him about the current and potential challenges facing AI development--as well as the solutions. A: I want to shift the question. The threats overlap, whether it's predictive policing and risk assessment in the near term, or more scaled and advanced systems in the longer term. Many of these issues also have a basis in history. So potential risks and ways to approach them are not as abstract as we think.

More than a thousand days after the water problems in Flint, Michigan, became national news, thousands of homes in the city still have lead pipes, from which the toxic metal can leach into the water supply. To remedy the problem, the lead pipes need to be replaced with safer, copper ones. That sounds straightforward, but it is a challenge to figure out which homes have lead pipes in the first place. The City's records are incomplete and inaccurate. And digging up all the pipes would be costly and time-consuming.

The algorithm is saving about $10 million as part of an effort to replace the city's water infrastructure. To catch you up: In 2014, Flint began getting water from Flint River rather than the Detroit water system. Mistreatment of the new water supply, combined with old lead pipes, created contaminated water for residents. Solving the problem: Records that could be used to figure out which houses might be affected by corroded old pipes were missing or incomplete. So the city turned to AI.

EFFORTS are under way to replace the lead pipes that have been contaminating the water supply in the city of Flint, Michigan. Nobody knows which of the 55,000 properties are directly affected, but an artificially intelligent algorithm can make accurate guesses. The Flint water crisis began in 2014 when city officials began sourcing water from the local river instead of the Detroit water system. The water wasn't treated properly and corroded lead pipes, causing the heavy metal to leach into drinking water.