The ethics of sustainable <scp>AI</scp>: Why animals (should) matter for a sustainable use of <scp>AI</scp>

Bossert, Leonie; Hagendorff, Thilo

doi:10.1002/sd.2596

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…The ethics of sustainable AI, as discussed by Bossert & Hagendorff (2023), resonate with our findings on the importance of considering environmental impacts, particularly greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption (Bossert & Hagendorff, 2023). This ethical perspective is crucial for guiding the development and deployment of environmentally sustainable AI technologies.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

The Environmental Impacts of AI and Digital Technologies

Khajeh Naeeni,

Nouhi

2023

aitechbesosci

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This study aims to investigate the environmental impacts of AI and digital technologies, identify potential mitigation strategies, and assess the role of policy, regulation, and public awareness in fostering sustainable practices within this domain. Employing a qualitative research methodology, this study collected data through semi-structured interviews with 27 professionals across the technology sector, environmental research, policy-making, and academia. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the interview transcripts, allowing for the identification of main themes and categories related to the environmental impacts of AI and digital technologies and the exploration of potential mitigation strategies. Five main themes emerged from the analysis: Direct Environmental Impact, Mitigation Strategies, Technological Innovations, Policy and Regulation, and Public Awareness and Engagement. Each theme encompasses various categories and concepts, such as Energy Consumption, E-Waste, Renewable Energy Adoption, Sustainable Design, Energy-Efficient Hardware, Legislation and Standards, Educational Campaigns, and Digital Literacy. The findings highlight the complex and multifaceted nature of AI and digital technologies' environmental impacts, along with the crucial role of innovative mitigation strategies and comprehensive policy frameworks in addressing these challenges. The study concludes that while AI and digital technologies offer tremendous potential for advancing sustainable development, their deployment must be carefully managed to minimize negative environmental impacts. It underscores the importance of integrating sustainability considerations into the development and deployment of these technologies, alongside fostering robust policy and regulatory frameworks and enhancing public awareness and engagement to achieve a sustainable digital future.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

The Environmental Impacts of AI and Digital Technologies

Khajeh Naeeni,

Nouhi

2023

aitechbesosci

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“…In sum, many parts of the ethics literature are predominantly echoing previous publications, leading to a discourse that is frequently repetitive, combined with a tacit disregard for underpinning claims with empirical insights or statistics. Additionally, the literature exhibits a limitation in that it is solely anthropocentric, neglecting perspectives on generative AI that consider its impacts on non-human animals [159][160][161][162][163] . Another noticeable trait of the discourse on the ethics of generative AI is its emphasis on…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical and methodological challenges in building morally informed AI systems

Hagendorff

Danks

2022

AI Ethics

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Recent progress in large language models has led to applications that can (at least) simulate possession of full moral agency due to their capacity to report context-sensitive moral assessments in open-domain conversations. However, automating moral decision-making faces several methodological as well as ethical challenges. They arise in the fields of bias mitigation, missing ground truth for moral “correctness”, effects of bounded ethicality in machines, changes in moral norms over time, risks of using morally informed AI systems as actual advice, as well as societal implications an increasing importance of algorithmic moral decision-making would have. This paper comments on all these challenges and provides critical considerations for future research on full artificial moral agency. Importantly, some of the adduced challenges can be met by more careful technology design, but others necessarily require engagement with core problems of meta-ethics.

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“…As Pasquale (2020) has argued, it is undoubtedly important to ensure that human expertise is valued, and that AI is designed to benefit and not harm humans. Yet this perspective also reflects anthropocentrism (Rigley et al 2023;Coghlan and Parker 2023;Bossert and Hagendorff 2023;Hagendorff et al 2023) as well as human supremacy (Estrada 2020) and an orientation away from ecological justice (Donhauser 2019), and risks obscuring the potential harm of AI for healthcare to the global environment and to nonhumans. As documented by Owe and Baum (2021b;, anthropocentrism may take multiple forms.…”

Section: The Expected Benefits Of Ai For Healthcarementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This re-evaluation is essential in the face of mounting evidence that these forms of anthropocentrism have not only devastated the global environment and led to the irretrievable loss of biodiversity and the vast array of individual lives this represents, but ultimately have come to damage our own well-being (Owe and Baum 2021b;Bossert and Hagendorff 2023;Marselle et al 2019;Ross 2020). 2 This error should be avoided with regard to AI in healthcare, the very aim of which is ostensibly to benefit human health.…”

Section: The Expected Benefits Of Ai For Healthcarementioning

confidence: 99%

The Environmental Costs of Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare

Katirai

2024

ABR

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Healthcare has emerged as a key setting where expectations are rising for the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), encompassing a range of technologies of varying utility and benefit. This paper argues that, even as the development of AI for healthcare has been pushed forward by a range of public and private actors, insufficient attention has been paid to a key contradiction at the center of AI for healthcare: that its pursuit to improve health is necessarily accompanied by environmental costs which pose risks to human and environmental health—costs which are not necessarily directly borne by those benefiting from the technologies. This perspective paper begins by examining the purported promise of AI in healthcare, contrasting this with the environmental costs which arise across the AI lifecycle, to highlight this contradiction inherent in the pursuit of AI. Its advancement—including in healthcare—is often described through deterministic language that presents it as inevitable. Yet, this paper argues that there is need for recognition of the environmental harm which this pursuit can lead to. Given recent initiatives to incorporate stakeholder involvement into decision-making around AI, the paper closes with a call for an expanded conception of stakeholders in AI for healthcare, to include consideration of those who may be indirectly affected by its development and deployment.

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The ethics of sustainable AI: Why animals (should) matter for a sustainable use of AI

Cited by 12 publications

References 71 publications

The Environmental Impacts of AI and Digital Technologies

The Environmental Impacts of AI and Digital Technologies

Ethical and methodological challenges in building morally informed AI systems

The Environmental Costs of Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare

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