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IS AI GOOD FOR THE PLANET?

Fri
6
May
Time Friday 6 May, 2022 at 12:15 - 13:00
Place Online via Zoom

We are constantly bombarded by slogans of AI coming to change our life, whether we like it or not. We are reassured it will be a better life. Better capitalism. A better environment. From smart devices to home voice assistants, image recognition and translation, AI is offered as the solution to the greatest challenges of this age. This portrayal of AI as a benevolent deity has a crucial effect: it obfuscates the materiality of the infrastructures and devices that are central to its functioning.

In her talk “Is AI good for the planet?” (Polity, 2021), Benedetta Brevini asks us to think about AI in a different, and more material way than most of us have in the past. In all its variety of forms, AI relies on large swathes of land and sea, vast arrays of technology, greenhouse gas-emitting machines and infrastructures that deplete scarce resources in their production, consumption, and disposal.

Huge amount of energy

AI also relies on data centres that demand excessive amounts of energy, water and finite resources to compute, analyse and categorize.
Firmly situated in the critical tradition of political economy of communication, Brevini’s work forces us to reconsider the way we look at AI. For the first time, “Is AI good for the planet” brings the climate crisis to the centre of debates around AI developments.
Clearly, there are other important concerns about AI: from moral and ethical appeals for caution concerning the use of AI in military operations to loss of human expertise in safeguarding human rights, (public health and the judiciary), from algorithmic racial and gender biases to fears that AI will make human labour redundant. However, Brevini argues, that if we lose our environment, we lose our planet. So, we must understand and debate the environmental costs of AI.

Please register

To participate in the seminar #frAIday, please register here

Event type: Lecture

Benedetta Brevini, Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communications, Visiting Fellow, Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism, City University London. 

Contact
Tatyana Sarayeva
Read about Tatyana Sarayeva