AI and Environment

Artificial intelligence (AI) requires infrastructure that itself requires large amounts of minerals and energy-intensive industrial materials. At the same time, AI also reconfigure environments of all kinds into sites of resource extraction. Current attention to the intersection between environment and AI mostly focuses on reporting requirements for AI –highly quantifiable metrics for assessing environmental footprint of AI including carbon emissions and energy consumption. These metrics, however, overlook the broader material dependencies of the infrastructures the very development of AI technology relies on. My research in this area aims to build capacity for the development of new policy frameworks and approach that mitigate AI’s broader environmental justice impacts.