Can AI really help save the planet—or is it just another resource-hungry illusion? In the light of ambitions to shape sustainable societies, where the needs of all present human beings as well as future generations are met within the planetary ecological boundaries, promising approaches and solutions are desperately needed. The search especially includes the use of digital tools like artificial intelligence (AI), which is currently considered a “game-changer” and “revolutionary” technology in the fight against climate change by policy-makers, technologists and international organizations alike.
At the same time countless new AI data centers are built around the globe increasingly consuming electricity, water, space and other scarce resources. Since the promises of sustainable AI largely rely on narratives of efficiency and progress, we want to shed light on those narratives as well as the actual suitability and practical impacts of such approaches. We discussed if and how sustainable AI can be a leap forward in the sustainability project or if it is rather the technical solution to the climate crisis from a techno-solutionist vantage point simply reproducing the status quo. In two talks and a panel investigated the promised and actual impacts of sustainable AI as well as the ideological foundations behind an impactful emerging academic, political and economic topic.
Our Guests:
Paul Schütze, Osnabrück University, Germany
Paris Marx, Journalist and Host of the “Tech Won’t Save Us” Podcast, Canada @techwontsaveus
The event was organized by the Weizenbaum Institute’s research project "Towards Informational Sustainability: Grasping the Co-Productionist Nature of Digitalization and Sustainability", which explores how digitalization and sustainability are connected.
