Rethinking Realities
The Sustainability of AI or AI for Sustainability: How Can It Be Both? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marcelo Machado
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a reality for most businesses while generative AI applications are at the top of the corporate agenda. Concurrently, there is a clear need for improving the sustainability performance of business processes. We are experiencing a climate crisis, and the culprit is likely carbon emissions. Consequently, governments have tightened environmental regulations. Moreover, customers, investors and stakeholders have shifted their mindset and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indicators are now part of the decision of doing business with a company or not. To increase the complexity of the situation, AI has the reputation of being power hungry requiring increasingly large amounts of energy to run. It is arguable AI may be worsening the climate crisis. As a sign of hope, there are multiple industry cases of the application of AI as enablers of sustainable business practices. Evidently, there is a dichotomy at play. AI must be more sustainable. Alternatively, AI must be used as an enabler of sustainability. In this study we propose AI must do both. Businesses must employ AI for improving their ESG performance and at the same time, AI technologies must be deployed in environmentally sustainable ways. Hence, AI must produce a net ESG performance gain. The main challenges for a net gain approach are metrics and scenario analysis. The objective of this research is to conduct a survey of technology solutions accurately measuring ESG performance of businesses and analyze it to shed light on the hypothesis of AI producing a net ESG impact.
Can We Think with ChatGPT?: The Future of Critical Thinking and the Humanities in the Era of Generative AI
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ana Ilievska
The greatest danger posed by generative AIs such as ChatGPT is not that it will automate white-collar workers out of a job (Kevin Roose), but that it will decrease the ability of humans to think autonomously. This because it is extremely good at planing, decision-making, optimization, and, above all, writing. All these skills constitute the particular human cognitive ability that we call “thinking.” I ask: Can “great evil” (in Hannah Arendt’s sense) arise from human-machine cognitive distribution? And can a collaboration between industry and the humanities provide an antidote? For healthy thinking to happen, an internal dialogue is necessary as well as the ability to engage in moral considerations. My study formulates specific proposals on how to foster these skills: 1) Industry can train GenAI models to assume multiple personalities (heteronyms) and be able to coherently discuss with humans while defending contrasting views; this will help both humans and eventually AIs to build and maintain a robust internal dialogue; 2) such models can be trained on existing philosophical forms of dialogue and 3) literary narratives that will allow large language models to have access to moral judgments from the most diverse and subjective perspectives.
Sustainnovation Challenge: Improving Social Relationships View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paul Egglestone
The Sustainnovation Challenge is an immersive learning experience focused on high school students having agency and a voice in the future of their place. This paper reflects on a series of Sustainnovation Challenges in six local government areas of New South Wales, Australia in 2023. It outlines the methodology underpinning the Challenges, drawing on relevant case study literature of related efforts to engage young people in civic activities using digital technologies responding to hyper local issues as diverse as water sustainability, creating safe spaces for women and girls, inclusion, bridging the digital divide, and developing a network of next-generation innovators. Specifically this paper demonstrates the potential of data physicalisation expressed through the one of the Sustainnovation Challenges in which participants co-designed and created an analogue interactive art work from digital data. 'City Pulse' as the flipdot data driven display became known - was designed to explore the general public’s understanding of data and how it can be used to improve life at street level - be that, better access to services, improving social relationships or better engaging with local governance. Situated at the intersection of of information visualisation and tangible interfaces This emerging field of research offers new possibilities to meet the rising democratic challenge that is every person’s ability to analyse and interpret an increasing volume of data. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations for educators, policymakers, and industry designed to support the inclusion of young people and to engage them in decisions that affect their future.
