Beyond Calculation: AI and Sustainability
Channel: John Thackara Videos
Date: 2021-12-12

This 20 minute talk explores two questions: Can AI serve all of life, not just human life? And if so, how? It's my keynote for International Forum on Innovation and Emerging Industries Development (IEID) in Shanghai 02 December 2021. I gave the talk at the invitation of Professor Filippo Fabrocini  
https://www.iasdr2021.org/team/filippo-fabrocini

MAIN POINTS IN THIS TALK:
Ethical principles to guide Artificial Intelligence have been widely discussed. A common theme: the purpose of AI is to serve human good.
   But such a purpose is too limited: it ignores the other life forms we share the living planet with.  
So this talk explores two questions: Can AI serve all of life, not just human life? And if so, how?
   Driven by climate finance and its need for metrics, major AI projects already monitor ecosystem health at multiple scales - from the planetary,  to the microscopic. 
   But their metaphor of a ‘global dashboard’ contains a danger: It frames the living world as machine - and nature is the opposite of a machine. 
   If finance needs nature to be machine-like - but nature is not a machine - how shall we proceed?
   I advocate for AI as a medium of experience in which see nature differently, and relate to nature differently.

00:00 - Introduction
00:36 - My main point: AI can be a medium of experience in which we relate to nature differently than we do now
02:51 - A “humans first” approach to the purpose of tech has had catastrophic results
03:39 - It makes little sense to discuss the purpose of AI separately from our place within life on earth
06:57 - AI is being developed as a global observation platform that monitors ecosystem health at multiple scales
13:30 - Tools are within our grasp for a giant global dashboard to monitor ecosystems
14:14 - But a new dashboard is not the same as a new system
15:02 - The dashboard metaphor, by framing nature as a machine, could actually increase ecological destruction

TRANSCRIPT
http://thackara.com/development-design/beyond-calculation-ai-and-sustainability/

BACKGROUND TO THIS TALK
In Shanghai, at the invitation of Prof. Dr. Yongqi Lou (Vice President at Tongji University) https://www.iasdr2021.org/team/yongqilou I’m developing the agenda for a Thematic Cluster around the agenda of Regenerative Design. This agenda identifies opportunities for design where climate finance, artificial intelligence, ecological restoration, green infrastructure, and agro-ecology, intersect. The work builds on our bioregioning investigation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872619300012 and the Urban-Rural expo we did at the end of 2019. https://www.slideshare.net/johnthackara/urbanrural-exhibition-shanghai-november-2019-john-thackara-personal-slides 

] Video production: Kristi van Riet



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Artificial Intelligence, A.I., AI, Sustainability, Regenerative Design, artificial intelligence and environmental sustainability, John Thackaray, John Thackeray, John Thakara,