Do we need new laws to control AI? Also the Prix Ars Electronica 2024 winner speaks to SOEP

Do we need new laws to control AI?
Will current legislation be sufficient to control the development of AI? How is AI  affecting our human rights? Is AI good enough to draft legal submissions? Does automation bias make us want to trust the technology more than we should?  These are just some the of questions SOEP is asking international human rights attorney Susie Alegre.  She’s just published her latest book “Human Rights, Robot Wrongs” and will navigate us through the impact of AI on human rights and our interaction with machines.

 "Smoke and Mirrors" - the Prix d'Electronica 2024
Beatie Wolfe, pioneering artist and composer, has been awarded the Prix Ars Electronica "Golden Nica" for her work "Smoke and Mirrors". She’s used NASA data on methane emissions.  Probably the most prestigious Media Arts Award in the world Beatie represents 60 years of decades of NASA climate data – in this case rising methane levels, set alongside advertising slogans deployed by Big Oil companies to question climate change during this time.  Beatie has also beamed her music into space, weaving her second album into an NFC-enabled jacket.  SOEP discusses her piece which reflects the interface between art, music, and technology.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Ghislaine Boddington.

More on this week's stories:
Human Rights, Robot Wrongs
Beatie Wolfe - Prix Ars Electronica 2024 winner

Chapters

• 3:40 Do we need new AI laws or will current legislation do?
• 18:32 "Smoke and Mirrors" by Beatie Wolfe. Winner Prix Ars Electronica 2024

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello everybody, I'm Gareth and this is Somewhere on Earth. 

00:00:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Joining me today for some expert commentary is Ghislaine Boddington. Hello Ghislaine. How are you? 

00:00:19 Ghislaine Boddington 

I'm very good, Gareth and really happy to be joining you for this great show. 

00:00:23 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. It's so much to get into. Just because we like to have a little gossip at the top, just really quickly, I saw a link trainer today and you can ask me what it is if you want. 

00:00:32 Ghislaine Boddington 

Well, I'm gonna have to. Gareth, I'm sorry. I'm not a trainer expert. So tell me what a link  trainer is. 

00:00:38 Gareth Mitchell 

Alright, so for people who might be thinking I'm talking about athletic footwear, it is something a little bit different. It's actually a very early, quite possibly the first flight simulator for training pilots. And yeah, I've been to a rather brilliant aviation museum this afternoon. Isn’t that cool? 

00:00:50 Ghislaine Boddington 

Ohh. That is. 

00:00:53 Gareth Mitchell 

And yeah. And so long before you had these very elaborate flight simulators that you see in videos and stuff that they train airline pilots on these days, this was a thing that even like quite affectionately people thought it looked a little bit like a child's toy aeroplane. 

00:01:08 Gareth Mitchell 

And it was standing on rather than hydraulic rams or whatever these ones are these days, it was on a, like, almost like some organ bellows, basically. So the, and that's no coincidence because the guy who invented it, a chap called Ed Link. Hence the term Link Trainer, by the way, this is in the late 20s, early 30s. 

00:01:23 Ghislaine Boddington 

Right, right. 

00:01:28 Gareth Mitchell 

He came from an organ building family and background, and so to get the linked trainer to like rock and backwards and forwards and to to mimic the movements of an aircraft, it was standing on a bed of air that was pumped in by some organ bellows, and it made a real difference. Like training pilots in the 30s and into the Second World War, because they could do a whole load of ground training where it was nice and safe in the simulator and do all their mistakes on the ground hopefully so they'd ace it when they got up in the skies when it really mattered. 

00:01:59 Ghislaine Boddington 

Wow, this is like probably one of the earliest haptic interfaces where you've got feedback from your actual actions in in the simulated environment. Yeah, and this is from the 1920s thirties, yes. 

00:02:10 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, that's right, really early flights. 

00:02:12 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah, post First World War and leading up to training for the Second World War pilots. 

00:02:18 Gareth Mitchell 

You've got it. Yeah, the link trainer so there we are. If anybody's intrigued by that and and you should be everybody. It's an amazing story. And just the story of Ed Link and organs and how it all came together. And then just look it up. So it's the Link Trainer, there you are. 

00:02:29 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes. I will be. I'll be looking it up straight away. I thought you're going to talk about connected shoes. Linked trainers. I was like, right. OK, we're off trainers, we're into training here. Yes. Great. 

00:02:43 Gareth Mitchell 

Maybe we'll do that next week. We'll see. There we are. So I've set some homework. Go and look it up, everybody. It'll be worth it. And here comes the rest of the show. 

00:02:55 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:02:59 Gareth Mitchell 

We're talking about the legal climate and the, well, the actual climate in this edition. Yeah, we're looking at AI through the lens of the law, or at least how a leading human rights lawyer thinks about questions around access to justice, our reliance on the machines and whether artificial intelligence is or should be, rewriting the law textbooks. 

00:03:19 Gareth Mitchell 

And musician Beatie Wolfe is here to tell us about her work in combining art and data to say some scary and important things about that highly potent greenhouse gas. Methane. It's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:03:40 Gareth Mitchell 

First up then, access to justice is what matters when you want to change systems and defend your human rights. Those are not my words. I wish I could write that well, but those of leading international human rights lawyer Susie Alegre in her new book ‘Human Rights,  Robot Wrongs’. Now that quote I've just read out comes from a chapter all about the poor working conditions endured by content moderation staff working for technology companies. 

00:04:06 Gareth Mitchell 

And the whole book really is about how AI is affecting our human rights and the book’s taken, the whole discussion of our relationship with the machines in all kinds of fascinating directions, like what about care bots? Is AI good enough to draft legal submissions? Does automation bias make us want to trust the technology more than we should? Well, I'm not sure if we'll get through all those questions we've got quite a list to get through, but we'll do our best. If we don't hit those particular ones you'll just have to read the book, people. Susie, welcome along to the podcast. 

00:04:34 Susie Alegre  

Thanks. Pleasure to be here. 

00:04:36 Gareth Mitchell 

Marvellous. Right then. So you would think that things have never been better for kind of democratizing people's access to justice. You know, we have legal advice, chat bots that you can use for free or for not very much. There are AI conveyancers to help you buy a home. Large language models can help you draft letters to lawyers. These are good times for justice thanks to AI, aren't they? 

00:05:00 Susie Alegre  

Well, I think one of the really big problems when you talk about AI and the justice system is whether or not it's actually reliable. So you might be able to get a legal chat bot to give you really convincing sounding legal advice, but whether or not it will have anything to do with the actual law is a different matter entirely. And there's been some research on on legal analysis by chat bots of different flavours, which seems to indicate that even when they're fed on actual case law, their analysis of that case law is wrong roughly 60 to 80% of the time. So you know, if you were paying a lawyer for that, you'd be pretty disappointed with those kind of results on accuracy in the law. 

00:05:45 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. So because of this tendency of these large language models to, they call it hallucinating, don't they? Where they they'll come up with a load of stuff and it looks completely plausible. But then when you have a legal, eagle like you looking through it, you think, hmm, I smell a rat. 

00:06:00 Susie Alegre  

Well, absolutely. I mean, they're really just probability generators. So they are just predicting what's the most likely next word rather than providing any kind of actual legal analysis or intelligence, in fact, when looking at how the law might be. And I think it's quite dangerous at a time where, you know, we have huge reductions in legal aid and it's very difficult for people to get serious legal advice, that effectively putting these things forward as a cheap alternative, you know, it's no more a cheap alternative than just going and asking someone in the street what they think you should say about your your legal position. 

00:06:37 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. Now, Ghislaine, of course, is also here. And Ghislaine, I know you're very keen to move this conversation on to the human rights aspects, aren't you? 

00:06:46 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes, definitely. I really agree with you, Susie, around this legal chat bot stuff and I'm, and as I understand, the same is happening in the therapy sector too. It's a kind of harvesting of, you know, a load of stuff everywhere. And I think that the therapy sector as well, they're finding it quite scary, what's been offered to people in therapy. And I think you write about that too in the book about some cases, where if it's gone wrong, the the mental health stuff, etcetera. 

00:07:13 Ghislaine Boddington 

But I wanted to put forward to you the whole thing about copyright and creatives. Yeah. And this area of you know how generative AI is now available to many is setting off this whole thing, this problem about what is unethical, what is breaking the copyright laws. And coming from an arts background, sampling of course, has always been part of of the way the arts have worked. 

00:07:36 Ghislaine Boddington 

You know, it's been several different processes throughout history, have always used sampling. There's always been this kind of feeling that actually there's a flow through of inspiring perception, changing stuff that actually is recognised by artists. And yet, of course, in recent years we've had much more hold back on that. And I was wondering what you were feeling about where that's going now, the copyright side for artists in general. 

00:08:00 Susie Alegre  

And I think from a from a legal perspective with a very lawally answer, it depends. I think we're waiting to see the results of several lawsuits, particularly in the United States. Coming from a lot of different angles about copyright and effectively, you know theft as it's being described of creative material, also journalistic material as well as sort of image theft and and writing theft. How those cases pan out remains to be seen. 

00:08:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, and and and sorry, Susie, I know you're going to make a really important point here. I don't mean to cut across you, but it's just to clarify for the listeners and for myself actually. When you talk about all this copyright material, do you mean stuff that journalists and others will have written and put online and that's been slurped up by the large language models as their training data is? Is that part of the issue here? 

00:08:51 Susie Alegre  

Yes, absolutely. So the way these large language models operate is by being trained on reams and reams and reams of human created writing art content if you like, so that they learn what good potentially looks like and are then able to drive these sort of probability generators. So the big questions are whether or not this use of copyright material is in fact a breach of copyright, because it's not quite the same as just picking it up  

00:09:22 Susie Alegre  

and printing it out again and publishing it and passing it off as your own. Although in some cases, and I think it's the New York Times case, they are showing some examples of where New York Times content is effectively being almost exactly reproduced by these models and their sort of probability generation. 

00:09:43 Susie Alegre  

But what I think is going to be really interesting is that there will be different approaches and there are different laws around copyright in different jurisdictions and so you can see France for example has been moving very much in a sort of protecting creatives and looking at ways that, 

00:09:59 Susie Alegre  

where generative AI is used that creatives can be compensated and ways of protecting and and opting out their work from training models. And I think we're going to see pockets of, if you like, sort of culture and protection of creatives around the world, which might well give very different landscapes for creative professionals in the future in in different countries. 

00:10:28 Ghislaine Boddington 

You are right. You mentioned there, there's some big cases coming up, some big people like Taylor Swift is in the middle of staff. I believe Stephen Fry's gone through stuff. Scarlett Johansson's been in the news recently. So what you're suggesting is that these bigger cases by celebrity, kind of celebrity hit back situations would be potentially setting the benchmark, I guess, but in a different national scenarios, yeah. And we, we've gotta wait and find out how this works for different scenarios. 

00:10:56 Susie Alegre  

That could be it. And I think most of the cases that we're seeing at the moment are coming in the US, which is obviously where these companies are based. But you know, the wheels of justice turn fairly slowly and we may well see very different results in different jurisdictions as cases filter through and pop up in different areas. 

00:11:02 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes. 

00:11:15 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, of course it just so happens we have an artist, a musician, on this very show at the moment. Beatie Wolfe. I'm going to introduce you properly when we get to your item Beatie, but I can't have you sitting there and not comment on what we've just been talking about around artist rights, copyright and so on. So where do you come at this as a musician, given the huge potential of AI in your creative process? But as we've been hearing, there are all kinds of risks and challenges, especially to artists and musicians like you. 

00:11:46 Beatie Wolfe  

Well, I think I might be one of the only musicians who hasn't actually employed, you know consciously, because obviously AI can be factored into some of the plugins we're using and things like that. 

00:11:59 Beatie Wolfe  

But for me AI is interesting when it helps human beings do things that human beings aren't very good at doing. And it helps sort of iron out certain processes and maybe make those more, you know, watertight. With art, human beings are really good at making art. So I don't see the application of it from my side, and you know creatively in any way that's interesting.  And I think you know if you've got a model that's very good at imitation but isn't very good at creation, I mean, it's really, can't essentially create without, you know, rehashing existing 

00:12:36 Beatie Wolfe  

Work, I think we need to be, you know, creating new imagined works. Particularly at this time when you look at all of the different emergencies we face as human beings on the planet. You know, we really need to be plundering the depths of human imagination and using art as a force for good. And, you know, social activation and awareness and and yeah, I guess I just haven't jumped on the AI art train. 

00:13:04 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, not not jumping on that train. Sounds like a good subject for a song, actually, or an album title. But also I do want to, Susie, bring this to human rights. You know, so we've ended up talking about artist rights, which of course, I suppose you tell me if that is a subset of human rights.  

00:13:22 Susie Alegre  

It is, yes. 

00:13:24 Gareth Mitchell 

Ohh, thank goodness for that. So we were on topic. Everything's good. Happy days. In another aspect of human rights there, and I know that one thing that keeps you up at night cause you've written about this concern in your book, 

00:13:35 Gareth Mitchell 

is, of course, when we think about all the devices that these AI models that they operate on, whether it's our smartphones or great big cloud based servers and what have you. This is hardware at the end of the day and you have some grave and deep concerns about where this hardware comes from. It's often not from particularly nice places that treat people particularly particularly well.  

00:13:58 Susie Alegre  

Yes, I think it's one of the things we don't think about when we're going out to buy the next new shiny gadget is where all the minerals, all the materials that made it came from, all the people who built it. You know, we occasionally see stories about about poor working conditions in factories. Building iPhones or that sort of thing. But we don't really engage with it. And one of the things that I found 

00:14:25 Susie Alegre  

really quite shocking when I started researching the book was the scale of the problem of where the minerals that are the backbone of our tech lives come from. And they often come from conflict regions, for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they are being mined often illegally, often using indentured lLabour or child labour. And this, you know, this is what is driving all of our tech habits, and it's a really really big issue. The more tech we use, the bigger this issue becomes. 

00:15:01 Gareth Mitchell 

And Ghislaine, I know you're very worried, for instance about biometric technologies and face recognition, fingerprint recognition, those kinds of things which are going to, a whole  related, related to the whole AI argument as well. Can you just outline your concerns and I suppose anything you wanted to run by Susie on this? 

00:15:22 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes, I think in human rights terms, the, the whole area of harvesting our biometrics, and it would be good to know your thoughts on this Susie, face recognition of course and iris iris recognition at airports. But actually even more so now in what we call XR which includes VR, AR, all these immersion experiences where all of our biometrics are being collected and we can be identified very quickly. So here I'm talking about identity. Yeah.  

00:15:51 Ghislaine Boddington 

And then in the widest sense, it’s not just your voice, which you know obviously is a big issue and that's coming up in these celebrity cases. Yeah. But actually more than that, the whole of our body identity. Do you see that in this human rights area too? 

00:16:05 Susie Alegre  

Absolutely. I think that the increased collection of biometrics and particularly emotion recognition technology, so trying to read what we are thinking, what we are feeling from aspects of our biometrics, not just from our facial expressions, but as you say sort of eye tracking devices or or body function tracking to try and assess how we feel about different things. So I think it's a real concern, particularly for our right to freedom of thought and our right to freedom in our inner lives and essentially that kind of tracking that kind of surveillance is also being used in a way to then be turned around to manipulate us, to try to sell us stuff that we may or may not need, based on assessments of what we're feeling. 

00:16:55 Ghislaine Boddington 

Absolutely. And we know that it's happening massively everywhere. So have you got any ideas of cases that are approaching this kind of biometric misuse? 

00:17:06 Susie Alegre  

Well, I think it's going to be very interesting to see, you know, we have the EU AI act that was passed this year and that will be coming into force over the summer. And the UAI Act has sort of introduced a risk register of things where there are prohibited risks or unacceptable risks, high risk, limited risk and minimal risk. And so some of the prohibited risks include, for example, in Europe, biometric monitoring in public places. 

00:17:40 Susie Alegre  

And and also emotion recognition in education and in employment situations. So we're seeing the EU really start to put its money where its mouth is in terms of protecting fundamental rights through law around AI. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see the implementation of that and when that eventually starts to to come into force. 

00:18:05 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. Well, we'll, we'll, we'll leave it there for now. Seriously, Allegra, thank you so much. Your book, Human rights, and Robot Wrongs. And it's, I guess, this this podcast is going out kind of July-ish. Will the book be available around then? 

00:18:20 Susie Alegre  

Absolutely. The book is already available in most of the world and it will be out in North America in September. 

00:18:28 Gareth Mitchell 

Marvelous. Thank you very much, Susie. All right, then. Well, let's meet the person we've already met, and I'm going to introduce her properly here as well. I've written a really elaborate introduction, so here goes. It's not from an LLM in any way, because congratulations are actually in order for artist and composer Beatie Wolfe. Before I say, what the congratulations are in order for, I'd better just quickly tell you a bit about Beatie just in case you didn't know already. Beatie is a very interesting person. She wrote her university dissertation thesis on Leonard Cohen and then went on to work at the interface between art, music and technology. 

00:19:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Beatie has beamed her music into space via a famous gigantic horn antenna in New Jersey. She's woven her second album into an NFC enabled jacket, so I guess you could say she's truly reimagining what we mean by record jacket and most recently, Beatie co-created a massive rooftop solar display of shadow poetry.  

00:19:23 Gareth Mitchell 

She’s also just visualized six decades worth of climate data in a major work called ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ that premiered at the South by Southwest Festival earlier this year. And that is where the congratulations come in. Yes, ‘Smoke and mirrors’ has just won the Prix Ars Electronica "Golden Nica". Congratulations and welcome again Beatie. 

00:19:45 Beatie Wolfe  

Thank you so much, Gareth. 

00:19:46 Gareth Mitchell 

First, your response to this award. 

00:19:49 Beatie Wolfe  

Well, it was a wonderful surprise because the project came out only a couple of months ago, as you mentioned at South by Southwest in Austin. And about a week later my my father died very very suddenly, very dramatically, and it really turned my world upside down. Every project kind of fell through the cracks of the grief, including this one. And so a ot that had been planned for it I just wasn't able to follow through with.  

00:20:23 Beatie Wolfe  

So then you know, a few weeks ago I heard that it had won the Golden Nica, which yeah, apparently is is kind of a big deal.  I had, I hadn't realised, but a few friends informed me when when they heard. And yeah, it felt really like a way of in in some ways sort of relaunching the project. My father was actually the person who gave me the last note on it with his eagle eye critique. So in some ways, yeah, it also feels like an award for both of us. 

00:20:55 Gareth Mitchell 

OK. Well, that's that's so lovely and moving that you effectively dedicate this award to your father. And I'm sorry for your loss by the way Beatie, that's that's very sad. 

00:21:05 Gareth Mitchell 

So I guess this work has its genesis in well in so many areas of your work and your interests. But I'm thinking of a big project of yours called From Green to Red and back in the old Digital Planet days that preceded this podcast. I remember we came to talk to you about it in, this was in 2019 and From Green to Red, it was projected onto one of the famous buildings in Glasgow during COP 26, when that conference was on. This was the Armadillo Building. And what Green to Red did is it it visualized a whole load of CO2 data, didn't it? And so now you've moved on to methane data. So perhaps you can just briefly touch on Green to Red and perhaps link that forward to Smoke and Mirrors and where we are today. 

00:21:46 Beatie Wolfe  

So Smoke and Mirrors, yeah, very much is a continuation or let's say, like a parallel project to From Green to Red, which was a visualization of 800,000 years of rising CO2 levels, which was set to a track I wrote after singing Inconvenient Truth, and that came about, you know, cause I’d given this talk at JPL and one of the chief engineers had shown me these graphs.  

00:22:11 Beatie Wolfe  

And just realizing you know, well, firstly, Oh my God, you know, how are we in this position  we're currently currently in, and looking not just since the Industrial Revolution, but even in the last 50 years. 

00:22:24 Beatie Wolfe  

And realizing that data is so intangible and so unrelatable for so many people. From Green to Red became this sort of first translation of data into this kind of visual form that people could really absorb, you know, and then it had, obviously the music tracking alongside it. So that was a previous project that came out a couple of years ago. 

00:22:46 Beatie Wolfe  

But I saw that there was this kind of gap. There was something else that hadn't been accounted for, which was, you know, obviously methane is also incredibly damaging. It actually traps, I think, 30 times more heat than carbon. And it's increasingly becoming linked to the oil industry, the the fossil fuel industry which over the last six decades has run, you know, a smoke and mirrors, as I call it campaign of disinformation and misinformation around climate data and you know, environmental awareness. So with Smoke and Mirrors, I wanted to visualise the last, not 800,000 years, just 60 years of methane levels alongside these advertising campaigns for Exxon and Mobil, and you know, Chevron, BP, all of the usual players have been running during the during that critical time of human history. In really saying, This is why we are also in the position we're we're currently in. It's a lot of stuff that people aren't even fully aware of and I wanted to really bring that into view. 

00:23:55 Gareth Mitchell, 

And you really do and like so much brilliant art, it's it can be tricky to describe in a sonic medium like a podcast, but I'll do my best. You know, we see the Earth initially zoomed in on a few industrialized countries, and then the whole scene kind of zooms out. So we go from the country to the continent to the planetary level. And as this happens, as these 60 years elapse, these plumes appear,  

00:24:25 Gareth Mitchell 

visualizations of the methane. And at first they're just fairly sporadic little plumes of smoke and you're almost, well I was, watching it kind of in my typical optimistic cup half full way thinking, oh, that's not that bad. But then of course, you get to 2023 and the whole planet is more or less shrouded in this methane cloud and it's really disturbing because what it did for me, and I'd love to hear your response, Beatie was, I almost thought, wow. So I kind of extrapolated from 2023, you know, of course your work stops in the present day and in my head, I carried on animating this and it wasn't very pretty. 

00:25:03 Beatie Wolfe  

No, no, I mean in the last 50 years, that concentration level has effectively doubled. So that's what you're seeing because that's, you know, the period of time that we're looking at. 

00:25:14 Beatie Wolfe  

And then as you beautifully described, perfectly described the methane aspect of it in engulfing this image of the earth that's based on the iconic NASA blue marble shot, you know, that's deeply embedded in our in our consciousness and and the way that we got to see our planet properly for the first time. 

00:25:34 Beatie Wolfe  

But you have, you know this suffocating earth. But then you also have these slogans, you know, ‘oil pumps life’ and ‘your carbon footprint’, and ‘we're out to clean the air’. And all of these verbatim things that these, you know, the oil industry, were were saying, and were advertising. And I think it really pulls together those two narratives, you know, very coherently. 

00:26:02 Gareth Mitchell 

And and and of course with your, your lyrics and and your music. Now. Ghislaine Boddington, what do you make of this as a visualization? Because you're you're so interested in in that whole area, isn't it? The role of art in visualizing, making the invisible visible? 

00:26:17 Ghislaine Boddington 

Now, absolutely. And I I really with you Beatie as you know on this way that we can make awareness of important global issues like your work with climate change but through visualizations because of actually helping educate many people who just don't get this info from written media or stats or the news, etcetera. Doesn't reach them. It doesn't hit them. So I was wondering whether whether you'd been working with this in terms of who you who you're looking at actually, who do you want to most reach with this work, this amazing visualization. What's your aim in terms of who's out there that you know this has got to reach? 

00:26:56 Beatie Wolfe  

Well, that's an interesting question because I feel with every project actually I I never really have a particular audienc,you know. I I just have human beings really in, in mind and in a way I feel also with every project that I want them all to be as inclusive and accessible as possible. I want a five year old through to a, you know, 90 year old to be able to come through and and get something from it and something I definitely saw when it was exhibited at South by Southwest Beta version of it. 

00:27:28 Beatie Wolfe  

But I was amazed to see how many people were able to come through. But even in, you know, just a short amount of time, they got a sense of what they were viewing without necessarily fully understanding all of the layers. Because I think to be able to make the complex simple and to be able to make data feelable, not just something that you know or you can think about, but something you can actually feel and to be able to translate a timeline again into something that you know, even if it's 800,000 years, you can get a sense of it in in 4 minutes. 

00:28:04 Beatie Wolfe  

It's, that's the goal for me and I want, you know, it's really for anyone and and everyone. And I think the thing that's also been quite rewarding is, you know, I've had a number of conversations with data visualization, you know, visualizes and climate scientists who do this kind of work. More on a say, less artistic, but of finding those ways of visualizing the data. And you know also when it's really affecting them, that's a, that's a wonderful thing. 

00:28:32 Ghislaine Boddington 

Now that's great. And just to say, I think that, you know, alongside this, we're hearing a really wonderful song, your fantastic voice and the lyrics are really important, too. So you're layering in another edge, which people can link to immediately and fast. Yeah. 

00:28:48 Gareth Mitchell 

What, what? And with that, it's just hear some of those lyrics. But here it is, an excerpt from Oh, My Heart, by Beatie  Wolfe. 

Music: ‘Oh My Heart’ by Beatie Wolfe (w/Michael Stipe, Brian Eno) 

It's oh my heart. There's a sickness in this world  keeps on spreading. 

Through this land and sea. 

And though I know there is something in this world we must be learning.  

It’s almost killing me.  

Hold your heart my darling. Hold your heart my darling. 

Hold your heart my darling. Hold your heart my darling. Now. 

00:29:34 Beatie Wolfe  

That song was released as the world's first bioplastic record, with Michael Stipe and Brian Eno’s Earth Percent, and so it's a song I wrote close to 10 years ago just around the time of the Brexit vote. And I felt like you know, oh my God, are we sleepwalking off the side of a precipice as a greater human being species? 

00:29:53 Music: ‘‘Oh My Heart’ by Beatie Wolfe (w/Michael Stipe, Brian Eno) - cont 

Oh my heart 

There's a hatred in this world that keeps on growing 

Through the lies we speak 

And though I know the truth has never been so disturbing.  

It’s almost killing me  

Hold your heart my darling 

Hold your heart my darling. 

Hold your heart, my darling.  

Now. 

00:30:35 Beatie Wolfe  

So it in a way, it was, it wasn't as specific as From Green to Red, which was about an inconvenient truth, but it had this sort of sense of doom. So after it was released, as you know, the first non non PVC petroleum based record, it then felt like the perfect track for this visualization. 

00:30:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Hmm. Yeah. And I know, Ghislaine, you're very interested in the circular economy aspects that comes about from this work. Then, as you know, Beatiet ouched on there. 

00:31:06 Ghislaine Boddington 

You know, absolutely. I I I think it's really great. You've explained the bioplastic record. It was something that I've been reading about replacing this harmful production of of vinyl, which we all love and actually trying to minimize waste in the music industry. And I think that that's very important in terms of actually use of big data too, which you are using here,  of course, you know 60 years of data, how we're seeing the issues of 

00:31:33 Ghislaine Boddington 

how much, how many problems to climate change data is adding to, yeah, into this world, not just physical things, but data itself, whether it's heat, et cetera, and how we're starting to see circular economy solutions to actually pushing that heat, for example, from big data farms round into use for housing for growing under polytunnels etcetera, we need more of these solutions. 

00:31:58 Beatie Wolfe 

I agree. 

00:31:59 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, Beatie. So finally, then where can people find this track? And indeed, the album from which it comes and have an opportunity to buy the, the the bioplastic. How's that coming about? 

00:32:12 Beatie Wolfe  

Well, that's really funny. I thought you're gonna say, you know, where can they see the methane data and the oil ads and, you know, rather than 

00:32:10 Gareth Mitchell 

Ohh yes, that too. 

00:32:15 Beatie Wolfe  

Well, so the yeah, it's all of the information about this project is smoke.dash.mirrors.org and then the track, the bioplastic record actually sold out as soon as it kind of went up for sale. I think there's maybe a few copies on on eBay or something, but that's out. 

00:32:42 Beatie Wolfe  

And the track doesn't currently exist anywhere else because you know not to get into the a whole other conversation. But you know, music, the the streaming of music has has commodified it to whole new levels of, you know, jingles. So it's currently only as the visualization and as this bioplastic record. 

00:33:03 Gareth Mitchell 

Right, OK. Well clarified. And on a very serious note then, just if people want to see the animation, that's that's where we get, as you said, you gave that address for smoke and mirrors and that's where people can actually see what we've been talking about. 

00:33:15 Beatie Wolfe  

Smoke and mirrors by Beatie Wolfe. 

00:33:18 Gareth Mitchell 

Yep, got it. All right. There we are. Thank you very much Beatie Wolfe. Lovely to speak to you again. So that'll do for this edition of Somewhere on Earth. Of course you can get in touch with us, folks. Do you know, people do seem to still like e-mail these days. You'd almost think that they're a little bit off social media in some cases, not all cases. 

00:33:38 Gareth Mitchell 

So the address is hello at somewhere on earth.co. We were going to make it info at somewhere on earth, but we thought that sounded a little bit kind of formal. So it’s hello at somewhere on earth.co. And of course we are on all the socials. Well, the the important ones anyway. So contact us that way. But for now, from me, Gareth Mitchell and Ghislaine Boddington, and of course, producer Ania Lichtarowicz. Thanks for being there and see you next time. Bye bye.