21 March 2024. Beehive Seminar: Beyond AI as an environmental pharmakon. Christine Parker & Fiona Haines (Recording Available)
21 March 2024. 2 - 3 pm
Room 1002 (access via Level 9 stairs)
Melbourne Law School
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Beehive Seminar - Beyond AI as an environmental pharmakon: Principles for reopening the problem-space of machine learning’s carbon footprint
Christine Parker. & Fiona Haines
Professors Parker and Haines will critique the binary framing of AI as both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’ – that is, as pharmakon – in discourse about the environmental implications of artificial intelligence. The paper will show how the policy discourses of leading actors such as the OECD, Green Software Foundation and Microsoft’s data scientists are of resolving the pharmacological nature of AI’s environmental impact by narrowing the scope of its toxic properties and hence the solutions required in order to enable the technology’s continued use and expansion. Parker argues that these discourses are reducing and over simplifying the problem at stake to a simple proposition: we need more AI for climate tech applications but less energy thirsty AI. The paper shows how this framing of the problem arose from a particular recent political history of the ‘techlash’, which in turn led to considerable efforts to quantify AI’s carbon footprint.