Sustainable AI Futures

This book examines sustainable AI as it relates to social impacts, environmental thresholds, transformative technologies, and complex systems and narratives that help us to better understand, explain, and evaluate uncertain but shared AI futures.

Sustainable AI Futures explores the connection and interplay between two of the most transformative issues of our time: artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainability, bringing together a broad range of voices to discuss core issues and themes surrounding the integrated futures of humanity, technology, and the world at large. AI defies singular analysis and is becoming increasingly integrated into natural systems, physical structures, social processes, and conceptual debates regarding new technology and its role in the world, including and especially the Majority World. The expanding and evolving impacts of human technology are increasingly encompassing the globe and extending far beyond the confines of the planet. Whether we can sustain our ability survive and thrive together in the face of technological transformations remains to be seen: in order to uncover new possibilities, it is necessary to accentuate and clarify muted or distorted aspects of sustainable AI ethics debates, and to assign due prominence to novel and underrepresented concepts, diagnoses, and solutions. The task of analysis and ethical evaluation of the relevant phenomena is complex and often daunting. However, amidst these intricacies, there are compelling reasons to maintain a sense of optimism. In the face of mounting challenges, the possibilities of shared, sustainable futures shine a light on the viability of humanity, our planet, our extraplanetary trajectory, and the transformative potential of forming the right relationships to AI and the spaces that we shape together.