Beyond AI as an environmental pharmakon: Principles for reopening the problem-space of machine learning's carbon footprint

Abstract

In this paper, we critique a pervasive discourse about the environmental implications of artificial intelligence as witnessed in news media, public policy analysis and computer science literature. In this discourse, AI is seen through a paradoxical lens: as essential to reducing the damaging effects of the climate crisis and, at the same time, a looming threat to both the climate and broader ecological crises. This seemingly contradictory framing of AI as both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’ resonates with the concept of pharmakon, a heuristic device used extensively in the philosophy of technology. In this paper we show how the policy discourses of leading actors such as the OECD, Green Software Foun..