Irish Examiner view: We need monitoring tech in the wake of Blackwater fish kill disaster
Cork County Council’s proposed real-time water quality monitoring systems are a no-brainer — especially after the disastrous Blackwater fish kill. File picture
The report last week into the mass fish kill in Cork’s Blackwater River — the worst in the State, with at least 32,000 salmon and trout dead — did not have the answer anglers and environmentalists wanted.
Local groups said they were shocked and appalled that it found no cause for the incident which rightly sparked alarm among those who use the river — indeed, among all people who care about Ireland’s natural environment.
The Blackwater is classed by the EU as one of the six most ecologically important rivers in Europe, and it is a special area of conservation that requires and deserves the utmost protection.
And it’s not as if this was a cursory report, given that it weighed in at over 100 pages.
Nonetheless, to quote the Irish Examiner’s news story, it could find “no evidence of a link between the fish kill and an identifiable pollution incident, or a specific environmental exposure, or waterborne irritant”. Whatever caused the mass kill likely entered the water on August 5 or 6, and was dispersed enough within days not to show in extensive testing in the time after. Some 900 chemicals were tested for.
That some of our protected species, such as the freshwater pearl mussel, were unscathed is a partial comfort. That the pollutant — or whatever it was — could not be traced to commercial, industrial, or agricultural activities is no real comfort at all.
If it happened once, it can, we must accept, happen again, and as it is fish stocks have been set back about a decade. There have been calls by some county councillors for the Government to compensate angling clubs that use the river.
Whether or not this comes to pass isn’t the issue, but it does highlight the importance people place on access and use of our rivers, as well as the potential economic fallout if such access is restricted.
Some anglers rely on fishing tourism, for example, and if there are no fish then there’s no reason for those tourists to visit. And when one includes fisheries, it’s clear that livelihoods are very much at stake, which makes it all the more galling no cause can be found for the mass kill.
In a country where official reports into all sorts of things routinely kick the can down the road, this one also exposes a major flaw in our river management: The lack of real time data, and potentially slow responses to environmental incidents as a result.
Much like triage in a medical situation, the sooner somebody can respond and act, the higher the likelihood that the damage can be, if not averted, then contained.
All the more important, then, that Cork County Council’s proposals to allow for monitoring systems that allow for realtime data on the river’s water quality do not fall on deaf ears at the EPA and Inland Fisheries Ireland.
In a country that has a track record of being slow to move on important projects — think of the flood defences in Midleton, for example, though any area in the country can cite an example — this is a relatively straightforward project that could pay for itself in time, should disaster strike and immediate action be needed.
These devices, well established in other countries, are solar powered and anchored to the riverbed. They could be an invaluable asset in working to ensure this disaster never happens again. Our ecosystem might never recover.
There have long been warnings — promises, in some cases — that the dawn of AI would bring with it a swathe of job cuts as the technology replaced human labour in various areas.
There has been no shortage, either, of AI being cited alongside layoffs by some of the tech companies, though the results have been mixed at best, with payments platform Klarna among those having to rehire human workers after their AI replacements proved incapable.
Now comes a slightly different approach — warning staff that if they can’t be retrained, they’ll be let go. That’s the model now at play with the Dublin-headquartered consulting giant Accenture, which has let 11,000 workers go as part of a $865m restructuring and is open to moving on others who, for whatever reason, can’t pick up the skills.
Or rather, to use the management speak of Julie Sweet: “We are exiting on a compressed timeline people where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need.”
Quite the corporate way to justify jettisoning your expertise.
The company has been hit by a general cut to US government spending, which in turn has affected the new projects it has been hired for. That said, its net income is still north of $7.8bn, so it’s not exactly doing badly.
With 779,000 employees, it says about 77,000 are skilled AI or data professionals, though, as with everything in the field of artificial intelligence, the definition of what “skilled” means in this context is elusive.
There’s no guarantee that the upskilling is even effective. A recent study by MIT found that 95% of companies that had tried integrating AI into their work had found no worthwhile increase in revenue.
Meanwhile, an ongoing study run in part by researchers at Stanford university has found that workers are using AI tools to generate low-quality work that needs hours of fixing by human colleagues. This slop — the preferred term for poor-quality AI-generated material — is in some cases just the first stuff spat out by ChatGPT or one of the other services, and passed on without even a first-pass check or edit.
The psychological name for this is “cognitive offloading”. That’s supposed to be when humans use machines or other tools to do the thinking, such as a calculator, or an app used to publish to multiple social media platforms at once. But, as the study author notes, what’s happening is that AI slop “uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being”.
As it is, AI slop is responsible for consuming vast quantities of electricity, so much so that in the past week the Taoiseach has talked about needing to build offshore windfarms to power it, while the EU has raised concerns about our environmental goals because of the energy demand for data centres.
Wouldn’t it be something if we were to finally have a system that finally gives our waterways adequate protection only for them to be destroyed by the AI gamble?
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