Blair Gordon S
School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK.
Patterns (N Y). 2020 Aug 14;1(5):100068. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100068.
Contemporary digital technologies can make a profound impact on our understanding of the natural environment in moving toward sustainable futures. Examples of such technologies included sources of new data (e.g., an environmental Internet of Things), the ability to storage and process the large datasets that will result from this (e.g., through cloud computing), and the potential of data science and AI to make sense of these data alongside human experts. However, these same trends pose a threat to sustainable futures through, for example, the carbon footprint of digital technology and the risks of this escalating through the very trends mentioned above.
当代数字技术在迈向可持续未来的过程中，会对我们对自然环境的理解产生深远影响。这类技术的例子包括新数据来源（如环境物联网）、存储和处理由此产生的大型数据集的能力（如通过云计算），以及数据科学和人工智能与人类专家一起解读这些数据的潜力。然而，这些相同的趋势也对可持续未来构成威胁，例如，通过数字技术的碳足迹以及上述趋势导致这种碳足迹不断增加的风险。
