Leuven-Bonn-Delft Workshop on AI and Sustainability

van Uffelen, Lauwaert, Coeckelbergh & Kudina

In recent years, increasing attention has been drawn to the environmentalimpact of AI. Particularly, the development and training of AI systems require significant amounts of energy, water, and raw materials. This raises new ethical questions, such as: when is it (un)justifiable to develop an AI system, considering its environmental impact? This question has been scarcely addressed in the academic literature. To tackle this question, this article draws from environmental justice scholarship. In that field, three categories of justice are distinguished, referring to three elements that can be unjust: the distribution of benefits and burdens (distributive justice), decision-making procedures (procedural justice), and institutionalized social norms and relations (justice as recognition). Based on these distinctions, we outline criteria for determining the ethical admissibility of AI, given its ecological impact.

Vandemeulebroucke

Healthcare entails an ethical paradox. While it undeniably contributes to the improvement of human health, it also contributes to current climate and environmental crises. By doing so, healthcare also negatively impacts environmental determinants of health. Indeed, healthcare is a major contributor to greenhouse gases, depends on the extraction of natural resources to procure medical goods, and produces huge amounts of waste. In the context of current nature crises and their effects on health, healthcare’s environmental impact needs to be confronted. The use of artificial intelligence in healthcare, with its promised potential to make different healthcare practices more efficient, could be seen as a “medicine” for the ethical paradox in which healthcare finds itself in, leading to more sustainable healthcare. Artificial intelligence, however, has its own grave impact on current nature crises which is becoming increasingly evident. As such, artificial intelligence seems to contain its own “noxious” effects on human health. In this presentation I will first give an overview of healthcare’s and artificial intelligence’s impact on the climate and nature and how this impact affects human health. After, the ethical tensions of these impacts will be laid bare. In a final step, a rather structural stance will be taken by relying on the discourse of global bioethics in an attempt to avoid the dubious nature of both healthcare and artificial intelligence by questioning what we mean with “human health” so to open imaginaries of sustainable health for all.