As artificial intelligence reshapes the world, digital rights advocates warn of the downsides, ranging from the technologies' environmental footprint to surveillance and "data colonialism."
The company’s goal to be carbon negative by 2030 is harder to reach, but President Brad Smith says the good AI can do for the world will outweigh its environmental impact.
Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.
S. Monserrate. MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, (Jan 27, 2022)https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/pub/the-cloud-is-material.
E. Strubell, A. Ganesh, and A. McCallum. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, page 3645–3650. Firenze, Association for Computational Linguistics, (July 2019)