AI & Sustainability
AI, Environment, and Society Public Syllabus
This syllabus provides resources and prompts designed to promote critical thinking and engages with a wide variety of topics in order to produce a holistic approach to the subject of AI and sustainability. There are four main sections (Environment, Economy, Ethics, and Education), each of which is organized around a series of subtopics. Included in each section are resources that range from academic articles and scientific reports to podcast episodes, blog posts, and news articles. It is designed to be accessible to diverse audiences, including researchers, policymakers, educators, and the general public.
Who Are We?
The AI and Sustainability workgroup scrutinizes the environmental justice dimensions of deploying AI and the long-term sustainability of this technology from the perspective of environmental humanities.
AI is an energy-intensive technology whose training processes and hardware raise serious concerns about the planetary impacts of carbon emissions, natural resource extraction, expansion of computational infrastructure, and electronic waste. By dissecting the environmental and social costs that are inherent but often obscured in AI applications, this workgroup aims to develop a critically informed, ecological discourse around AI that prioritizes sustainability over technocratic governance and unchecked technological growth.
