Climate And Resource Awareness is Imperative to Achieving Sustainable AI (and Preventing a Global AI Arms Race)

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of integrating climate awareness and resource equity in AI development to ensure sustainability across environmental, social, and economic dimensions, proposing a new framework and actionable strategies.

Contribution

It introduces the CARAML framework to reconcile climate and resource awareness in sustainable AI and offers multi-level recommendations for balanced AI progress.

Findings

Highlighting the need for balancing environmental and social sustainability in AI

Proposing the CARAML framework for sustainable AI development

Providing actionable recommendations for various stakeholders

Abstract

Sustainability encompasses three key facets: economic, environmental, and social. However, the nascent discourse that is emerging on sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) has predominantly focused on the environmental sustainability of AI, often neglecting the economic and social aspects. Achieving truly sustainable AI necessitates addressing the tension between its climate awareness and its social sustainability, which hinges on equitable access to AI development resources. The concept of resource awareness advocates for broader access to the infrastructure required to develop AI, fostering equity in AI innovation. Yet, this push for improving accessibility often overlooks the environmental costs of expanding such resource usage. In this position paper, we argue that reconciling climate and resource awareness is essential to realizing the full potential of sustainable AI. We use the framework of base-superstructure to analyze how the material conditions are influencing the current AI discourse. We also introduce the Climate and Resource Aware Machine Learning (CARAML) framework to address this conflict and propose actionable recommendations spanning individual, community, industry, government, and global levels to achieve sustainable AI.