Many Worlds of AI

Abstract: In light of the ongoing climate crisis and loss of biodiversity and natural environment, increasing hopes are directed to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to counter and mitigate negative effects of human activities. This use of AI-technologies for sustainability inadvertently leads to the question of how sustainable these technologies themselves are. As AI begins to affect more and more areas of human life, it must be scrutinized what sustainability means in different settings, for different communities, at different scales and for the planet. To address this multidimensionality of the relationship between AI and sustainability, AI needs to be conceived as a world object, not only affecting a small corner of the world, but the world as a whole. Hence, to focus on the relationship between AI and sustainability means focussing on the interplay between the local ecologico-socio-technical and the global ecologico-socio-technical impact of the design, development, use, and disposal of AI in different settings. Therefore, using AI for sustainable purposes is not a straightforward endeavour. It relates to questions from a variety of fields of inquiry and thus needs to be approached from an interdisciplinary angle. The panel participants will present and discuss how they conceive interdisciplinarity in regard to the relation between sustainability and AI. Each of the four participants work from within a specific research setting, namely healthcare, philosophy, environmental sciences, and political sciences, each with its own methodologies, to understand how AI relates to the idea of sustainability. During the panel discussion their insights will be shared and critically assessed with explicit attention to what the theoretical and practical implications are for the interplay between the local ecological-socio-technical and the global ecological-socio-technical impact of the design, development, use, and disposal of AI in different settings.

Panelists: Şebnem Yardımcı Geyikçi (PhD) Dr. Sebnem Yardımcı-Geyikçi is a Research Associate in the Institute for Science and Ethics at University of Bonn. Before joining the IWE, she worked as associate professor of politics at Hacettepe University, Department of Political Science and Public Administration. She completed her Ph.D. studies in Government at the University of Essex in 2013. She also has a second Ph.D. degree in political science from Bilkent University, received in 2015. Her articles appeared in a number of leading political science journals including Party Politics, Democratization, Government and Opposition, Political Quarterly. Her current research concerns the political impact of AI, party politics, questions of representation, contentious politics and digitalization of political parties. She was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) and a Visiting Fulbright Scholar in the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she received the Young Scientist Award in the field of Political Science given by the Academy of Science in Turkey. Currently, she serves as a board member of Turkish Political Science Association (Siyasi Ilimler Turk Dernegi, SITD) and a steering committee member of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Political Parties.

Tijs Vandemeulebroucke (PhD) Tijs Vandemeulebroucke is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sustainable AI Lab of the University of Bonn, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (KU Leuven, 2019), and MA degrees in theology and religious studies (KU Leuven, 2013) and philosophy (KU Leuven, 2015). He researches the ethical tension between the use of AI in healthcare settings and the environmental, health, and social impact of the development and recycling of AI on local communities across the world. His research relies on philosophical-ethical approaches as care ethics, global bioethics, critical theory of technology, and empirical approaches as grounded theory. Tijs won the 2020 Doctoral Dissertation Award on Artificial Intelligence & Ethics jointly given by the Microsoft Corporation and the Pontifical Academy for Life. His work is published in journals as Science & Engineering Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Medical Ethics.

Larissa Bolte (MA) Larissa Bolte is a PhD student at the Sustainable AI Lab of the Institute for Science and Ethics at the University of Bonn, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Aimee van Wynsberghe. She holds a MA degree in philosophy (University of Bonn, 2021). Larissa investigates the conceptual foundations of sustainability, considering both the notion’s central characteristics and its normative implications. Within the Sustainable AI Lab, she examines how sustainability, construed as a theoretical lens, can inform AI ethics. Larissa has previously worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Science and Ethics and at the German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences. She has also been a tutor for both moral philosophy and logic and basic research at the philosophy department of the University of Bonn. Larissa was a co-organiser of the Sustainable AI Conference 2021 and has published in the journal Sustainability.

Sophia Falk (MSc) Sophia Falk is a PhD student at the Sustainable AI Lab of the University of Bonn, Germany. She holds a M.Sc. degree in Environmental and Resource Economics (Kiel University, 2022) and a BA in International Culture and Business Studies (Passau University, 2019). Her research focus is the environmental impact of AI hardware components throughout their entire life cycle (cradle-to-grave). Beyond that, the local environmental, health and social impacts of mining activities in resource-rich countries and electronic waste sites in Africa are of particular interest to her research. Her work is based on analytical methodological skills such as statistical-econometric methods, intertemporal resource management, sustainability economics, and climate policy.