By Mary O’KEEFE

AI (artificial intelligence) is a tool that can be helpful in so many ways. For example, the company Baracoda unveiled BMind, the first AI-powered smart mirror for mental wellness. It can apparently manage stress, soothe anxiety and reduce insomnia. The AI identifies different sentiments and adapts to the user’s mood by providing light therapy sessions and even guided meditation.

And then there is the Cardiocam mirror that measures and displays the heart rate of whoever looks into it. Over time the mirror will establish a baseline resting heart rate thus allowing users over time to monitor changes in their cardiac health.

AI can also be useful when looking at climate change. In a paper titled “Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning” that was co-authored by Priya Donti, MIT professor and co-founder and executive director of global nonprofit Climate Change AI, it stated some ways AI can help scientists and policymakers address climate change issues. AI can do this by gathering and analyzing data. There is so much information that can be gathered from a variety of areas. One example, reported in an MIT Sloan School of Management article, is satellite images that show agricultural land or forest cover around the world. AI can be deployed to assess what kinds of crops are being grown where and what adaptive measures should be put in place in light of climate projections.

AI can use instruments to forecast actions that would be most helpful for future projects, like predicting the demand for transportation infrastructure or the probability of extreme weather events.

I know how valuable AI can be but my science fiction soul continues to hold me back from embracing this new technology messiah.

As I have said, science fiction writers are modern oracles and you can’t get much better future predictions/warnings than from Star Trek and Twilight Zone.

As I read over the new AI technologies that focus on climate change, I completely understood their value – but the one thing I noticed more and more was the lack of human interaction with nature. And nature is what we are supposed to be saving, right? It appeared that the more I read about AI the more I felt that, although human input is required, real hands-on human work could easily become obsolete … And from that I go to the Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

This is when a man, Mr. Wordsworth, is on trial for being obsolete; he was a librarian.

“Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace,” Wordsworth said to his judge and accusers of their single-minded attitude.

This was a time when books, and beliefs, were no longer needed. The “state” had decided what was the truth and what needed to be known.

“Since there are no more books there are no more librarians,” said his judge. And therefore Wordsworth would be obsolete.

I think many of us worry about being tagged obsolete, especially as we age, but that fear is at the base of many of those surrounding AI. The fear is this technology will take over our jobs, our ability to drive, our way of life.

“It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom,” read Rod Serling who wrote the episode.

In the world where Wordsworth resided there was no need for books, or at least no need for books of poetry or faith. This future state decided what knowledge should be shared – which sounds a little too close for comfort when considering the book banning that has recently been discussed across the nation.

“You cannot destroy truth by burning pages,” Wordsworth said.

For me, AI can take all the data we feed it and look through climate data in a matter of minutes instead of months, it can present models of what best technologies will help reverse climate change … and yet I think there still needs to be human interaction, a real human touch when it comes to the Earth. For me, the inspiration for many of those who are fighting climate change does not come from data that has been gathered but from images of the destruction of the rain forest or of a sea lion struggling to breathe as a plastic net wraps around its neck.

It is the human, the librarian, in us that needs to inspire to protect our planet.

NOAA issued a high wind warning overnight from last night at 6 p.m. to noon today with winds gusting as high as 40 mph. We are still looking at Southern California chilly temperatures with highs in the mid 60s and lows in the low-to-mid 40s from Friday to Tuesday. Tonight the low could be around 39 with winds from five to 10 mph. Those winds continue through Friday morning.