The AI Coach
AI meets human behavior in these fun and insightful conversations with Danielle Gopen, a top founder coach and advisor, and Paul Fung, an experienced AI founder. We blend AI breakthroughs with real-world insights on business strategy, industry disruptions, leadership, and psychology while cutting through the hype to ask the hard questions.
This is for decision-makers like founders and business leaders who want to harness AI's potential thoughtfully, exploring both the technological edge and human elements that drive long-term success. Join us to challenge the status quo, navigate the shifting landscape of an AI-powered world, and get new information worth sharing.
The AI Coach
AI in Emergency Relief Efforts
What can AI's role be in emergency preparedness and disaster relief? We explore this by analyzing the transformative potential of AI technology related to improved predictions, faster emergency response, and efficient rebuilding efforts for communities grappling with the effects of devastating disasters.
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Hi Paul.
Speaker 2:How are you?
Speaker 1:Good, how's it going?
Speaker 2:I am good.
Speaker 1:So I do want to kick today off with the devastation from Hurricane Helene, and I had some thoughts and I know you had some thoughts about how AI can play a role in that now, but also in the future, for emergency preparation and response. Yeah, how does that sound?
Speaker 2:Sounds great.
Speaker 1:It's obviously devastating. What happened from Hurricane Helene across a large part of the country and most notably at least from what I'm hearing on the news is through the Tennessee and North Carolina region, which is a region that historically has not really been hit by hurricanes and I think right before this storm had had another significant rainstorm that caused a lot of flooding and other damage, and you know at this point over 200 lives lost and they're still counting. Just thinking out loud. You know AI's role in this type of massive relief response. I feel like, both today, what we have at our disposal, but then going forward, it seems like a natural fit to use AI to help scale relief efforts, especially at such a large scale where it's impossible for a single human to do a lot of the things that are needed.
Speaker 1:Something that came to mind was I don't know if you remember seeing this, but after the Mexico City earthquake a few years back, they had these little autonomous robots going into the debris and being able to move it around and search for life, and then, once they pinpointed where survivors were, they could have teams come in and extract them, and I'm not sure if there's a use case for that now. I don't know enough about what the current literal landscape is in these disaster areas, but it made me think about other things. I know the roads have been washed out and are impassable. I know they've been using helicopters. So it made me think like, okay, could you have drones that come in and help survey areas for what the destruction looks like and then maybe do like targeted drops, like supply drops, that a helicopter might not have access to because it's it needs more space?
Speaker 2:so anyway, just curious to like hear some thoughts about yeah, I think you know, when you had mentioned that you want to kind of chat about this as a topic, the immediate thing that came to mind for me is like just using ai to improve our prediction algorithms for weather patterns, and it's like what's going to happen, right? So I think you know, interestingly, and I don't know enough about it but like, even predicting weather is quite, quite hard. I mean, I think that I've even seen stats of like trying to predict weather more than like 10 days out is like very difficult, and you know that's right, exactly. And so even we have these incredible mathematical models around forecasting like the path of hurricanes, we still get them wrong all the time, and I think that's where the danger comes in, right? Is you think it's going to hit in one place and I'm not an expert on this but then if it hits in a different place, those people are very unprepared for what's going to happen. And so, yeah, I think it'd be interesting to see if the current generation of AI is going to be able to crunch more data, to be more accurate about either where hurricanes are going to land, or how much precipitation they're going to drop, or how severe they're going to be, or in California.
Speaker 2:You're in Southern California. I usually live in Northern California. When's the next big one going to hit Is something that people talk about. That's really hard to predict.
Speaker 1:We have been having a lot of earthquakes little ones, but still.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and so that's the first one that comes to mind. For me is better prediction of when these things could happen. And then the second thing that comes to mind is exactly what you mentioned, which is, unfortunately, these things are going to happen. I think it's really interesting to think about. Drones are a particularly interesting one because they can replace a lot of what humans do in search and rescue, I shouldn't say a lot of what the humans do In one specific role, which is finding people. They can probably do that more at scale with drones and with more elaborate type of sensors than humans could typically do, I would imagine. So I think it would be very cool if, in a future world where there has been a hurricane or something terrible, you can imagine the government releasing hundreds of drones into the air that maybe have temperature sensors or infrared or audio sensors, or maybe they could pick up on cell phone signals to try to identify where people might be. That human eyes wouldn't be able to see. Something along those lines.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that'd be really neat and you're just making me think. I just had this whole sequencing of events happen in my head, so you're making me think that there are two tracks here. There's the short-term response and then there's the long-term response and rebuilding efforts. And so the short-term just thinking, so you know any aerial view again of destruction and understanding what is where and best paths. You know AI is extremely good at detecting abnormalities in data and also detecting patterns very quickly, and so being able to get that output of analysis to the right teams so people know what's happening and where to go and what to do, I think is ultra important.
Speaker 1:And then I just had the thought about down the road, when we're out of the immediate crisis and it's time to rebuild. I mean, you have whole towns that were just decimated completely, and so you're talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of structures that need to be rebuilt. And so, as opposed to doing that on a one-by-one basis one homeowner here rebuilds their house and one owner over here rebuilds theirs and then the town rebuilds their facilities, type of thing then having some type of AI enabled supply chain effort, I guess it would be or some way of saying, okay, what's needed for this town at large. And so how can we bring in all of those things and optimize the rebuilding in a cohesive way?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's actually kind of two things that I think about there. I mean, I think there's an AI optimization problem there around, like how many emergency supplies do we need for a given population? I'm sure that stuff already exists. There's, like you know, more straightforward mathematical algorithms to say like here's how much water we need, here's how many generators we need, etc. And that's more for the relief effort, not the rebuilding.
Speaker 2:The thing that came to mind for the rebuilding is actually one of our Investors is an entrepreneur who runs a company called Monumental in the Netherlands, and they are AI bricklaying robots, which is pretty cool, and so I don't know if I've told you about this. Oh cool, it's actually, yeah, a little bit like a construction site robot and it lays brick one by one to help, obviously, build buildings and houses and stuff like that, and I do think there's definitely a future in which AI is going to play a bigger part in construction areas, building housing, whether it's for relief efforts or just standard housing. So, yeah, I guess, hopefully, communities that unfortunately face things like this can help get rebuilt more quickly in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because what you're making me think is so, historically, when you have a building site, you bring in human capital to build, but they need access to resources like plumbing for a bathroom, water, food, things that sustain them throughout the day as they're building. And most of the time people are not necessarily living in the area where they're working, so they're commuting in and out. You obviously need the roads for that and everything, and so then it presents this chicken and egg problem when you have this type of massive rebuilding effort, or even, if not rebuilding, just a general from scratch construction project in a rural area, say. And so then you're making me think like, oh well, if you have these robots, then maybe you have a way and I know nothing about these robots, this is just theorizing but maybe you have a way that helicopters or some other aerial transport can drop in the robots to start building out some of these early things so that there is more there.
Speaker 1:One you don't. Obviously these robots don't need the same resources to be sustained. They probably need some type of battery pack or electricity or something, but maybe they're even solar robots and so they charge themselves. But yeah, so some you know some way of having them come in to rebuild in these situations where they're it's. It's unforgiving for humans to be there for long periods of time and especially if you don't have direct access because there no roads, that you have this different version of an infrastructure available to help build out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's super interesting. I also, going back to the rescue effort stuff, I just had this idea. I don't know if it's feasible, I have no idea, but I was thinking about how we could use these drones and I was thinking no-transcript, in case you need help. And then if they blanketed the area afterwards with drones, those little kind of devices, those little beepers, you could press a button and it would send a signal that these drones could like see in some way, right. So it's almost like a what are they called? The medic alert or something, where you know older folks in case they fall. It's almost like a very cheap version of that that could then be picked up on. That signal could be seen by you know some sort of drone or something. I wonder if that could be, you know, cost effective enough only in situations where they knew, like with some certainty, like hey, a hurricane is going to hit this area. So we just want to make sure that people are safe if they need help.
Speaker 1:That is really interesting. Yeah, I mean you could even do it. You know natural disaster prone areas where there's some type of program, so make sure that, like you know, the batteries last for a year, like the annual type of thing. But I do think that's really interesting. I you know talking about the government response, like I don't know if you followed it that closely but FEMA saying they're out of money and are not able to assist in the way they have in previous disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, and they're offering people $750 as their aid for what's happened, which I think is just beyond awful. That's a whole other conversation.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I think you know the combined efforts between public sector and private sector for this type of relief, like AI does provide a lot of opportunity for it. Obviously, in this moment, right now, it might be a little bit, you know, too little, too late. That's something that needs to happen down the road. But if there's anyone out there listening who has access to some generative AI technology that they realize like, oh, this would be great for that, hopefully they volunteer it. I think that, going back to the idea of why AI is such a great thing, it's because it can really superpower our human efforts and leverage us in ways that we can't do necessarily on our own, and this is an example of doing that, for you know, the greater good yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think you know, to be clear, like you know, obviously you said this in the beginning but, like, what's happened is is awful, and so I certainly don't want people to think like, oh, you know, we're just like being opportunistic and using this as like fodder for our podcast. I mean, I do truly think this is an example of where ai is such a game-changing technology that it affects all areas of life, right, and and this is one area where I think we we would both love to see, you know, we talk about sometimes whether or not I think in the past we've talked about whether ai will be like net negative, net positive, right, and so hopefully, this is one of the areas where it's universally positive the changes we can make using AI to help in situations like this.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's lighthearted and sometimes it's oh, it's scary, but in this situation it's a real way that it can do something amazing in a very difficult time. And again we're just brainstorming. My hope is that there are people who are much closer to this, who really have the right ideas and can get people help as quickly as possible and then rebuild these communities, can get people help as quickly as possible and then rebuild these communities. But just some ideas for our listeners of you know, when real life things happen, how the technology that we're building and we'll have at our disposal and we'll get better and better as every year goes by can be implemented.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:So I'm not an environmental engineer, so maybe they are already doing this, and whether it's driven by AI or not, I don't know, but I'm just thinking, even to know. You know, with rapidly changing environmental conditions, so with flooding, for example, how do they know how long that flooding will last and like, at what rate is that water going down, so that they know, okay, based off that mathematical equation, 37 hours from now is when we can access this area.
Speaker 2:Just thinking about things like that maybe there's a role for AI there too. Yeah, I would guess I think they have mathematical models that can do that, but I do think the mathematical models are probably fairly flawed. It's such a complex problem that probably has so many variables that they probably have, you know, some sort of naive algorithm that they use and even might be a quite complex algorithm, but even with as complex as it is, it could probably still use, you know, some help from more modern methods, I would imagine Because, yeah, I bet those are really hard problems to think about Like, oh well, on average we think it would take this long, but there's probably so many variables at play and that's where these like really large models come into play is they can handle a lot more data than maybe some of the historical methods for modeling.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So at least then you know I don't want to say it in a cliche way, but truly hopes and prayers for these communities and hoping that they get the help that they need as quickly as possible and that there are no further obstacles to that, and wishing everybody to stay safe.
Speaker 2:I agree on all of that. I had some friends who live in Asheville and so they were able to get out thankfully, and I heard from them. That was great. So they were able to get out thankfully and I heard from them, that was great. I had one more thought around. This is one thing that happens in these instances and part of the reason might contribute to FEMA being out of budget. I'm not sure is sadly a thing that happens after things like this is fraud. A lot of fraud happens after these disasters to try and claim money for businesses that exist. And don't get me wrong, the vast majority of these claims, I'm sure, are certainly true, but I think there has been a history of there been like fraudulent claims where people are kind of stepping in and so yeah, I mean, we saw it with COVID too.
Speaker 1:You see a lot of lawsuits now.
Speaker 2:And so I wonder if, obviously, there's a lot of algorithms that are used to spot fraud. I wonder if the latest generation of AI could do a better job of detecting fraud as well, or speeding up the claims process for legitimate claims, so both of those things can happen, so that the people who do need money to rebuild their homes, to rebuild their businesses, they can get it faster and then also, hopefully, a lower fraud rate, which keeps more money going into the hands of the right people. So I think that's another area that could help as well.
Speaker 1:Super interesting. I totally agree. I'm thinking, okay, who can we send this episode to that can actually do more with this? I wish it were us, but I don't think we are the experts. But yeah, I think there's so many ways that I can help here. And people, still people. At the end of the day, still people. But again, leverage.
Speaker 2:I don't know anyone in FEMA personally, but if anyone listening does send us a lot.
Speaker 1:Yes, if it's helpful. If it's not, let us know. We'll talk about other things. All right, thanks, paul. Appreciate your thoughts today. Great conversation, thanks, danielle. Okay, bye.
