The Bonn Sustainable AI Lab is organizing their third bi-annual Sustainable AI Conference, taking place on September 16th-18th, with this year’s focus being Shaping Sustainable AI and its Futures.
Sustainable AI
How can we live in a world marred by constant changes and crises of all scales and magnitudes? Against the backdrop of social transformations and upheavals as well as climate crises and ecological catastrophes, we must investigate how technologies support the good life for all humans and other living entities. Is this a realizable goal or does it remain a utopian dream?
While the answer to this question remains open, the concept of “Sustainable AI” picks up on the underlying desire. It fosters AI applications for sustainability while recognizing the negative sustainability impacts of these very applications. In framing "Sustainable AI" we include environmental, societal, and economic aspects.
The concept of “Sustainable AI”, however, remains a fuzzy one, covering a multitude of different meanings. Questions arise concerning the objective, the scope, the scale, and the very definition of the notion. For example: What is and what needs to be sustained when developing and implementing AI systems? Do “sustainability” and “AI” have the same meaning across the majority and the minority world? And, since different current changes and crises are global in nature but play out locally, how does "Sustainable AI" fit within the tension between the global and local? With an eye towards the future, there is a dire need for approaches across disciplines to find answers to these and other pressing questions.
In addition to this conceptual unclarity, also methodological questions need to be addressed: How should we approach “Sustainable AI”? What disciplines, traditions, methodologies, or schools of thought offer helpful insights? Do we rely on mainstream scholarly traditions, or do we reinvigorate traditions that have been pushed to the perimeter? And where exactly should we turn our regard? To the past or the future? To the most affected or the most responsible? To problems or solutions?
Join us!
The Bonn Sustainable AI Lab invites scholars from all disciplines, civil society parties, industry and economic stakeholders, and policy-makers to critically reflect on these and other pressing issues, during our three-day conference. We invite both conceptual and methodological answers to these questions as well as exemplary case studies or empirical work.
Abstracts (max. 350 words) can be submitted until March 10th to info@sustainable-ai.eu. More information can be found on our website: www.iwe.uni-bonn.de/conference