AI Infrastructures and Sustainability

This book is an open access assembles cutting-edge research in media and communication exploring AI infrastructures and sustainability. It builds upon and expands perspectives on media infrastructure, addressing critical issues such as environmental impacts, economic concentration, and social justice areas that have not been comprehensively examined under the umbrella term sustainability within discussions on AI. The authors explore the complex social, economic and material processes through which AI formations take shape, and offer novel perspectives on the entanglement of digital media, AI and sustainability discourses as they manifest in the shaping of futures with AI.

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access Provides a much-needed depiction of AI infrastructures as inseparable from ecological, social and economic justice Makes visible the media and communication perspective on AI infrastructures regarding questions of sustainability Extends environmental media research to the specificity of AI imaginaries, materialities, economies, and governance

Autorentext

Anne Mollen is a postdoc researcher at the University of Münster. Her research focuses on justice in the context of automation, digital media and data-centric technologies, specifically social and environmental justice. She has been a member of the Sustainable AI working group of the German Committee for Sustainability Research.

Fieke Jansen is a postdoc researcher and co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interest is to understand how the material impact of expanding infrastructures is shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources. Fieke did her PhD at the data justice lab of Cardiff University.

Sigrid Kannengießer is Professor of Communication Science with a focus on Media Sociology at the University of Münster, Germany. Her research interests include digital technologies, AI infrastructures and sustainability; critical data practices; energy communication; social movements; and gender media studies.

Julia Velkova is Professor of Media and Culture at Linköping University. Her research explores the relations between digital infrastructures and energy, and the temporalities of media infrastructure. She is the co-editor of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations (2023).

Klappentext

“This book is essential reading for scholars interrogating the complex and rapidly emerging formation of ‘AI sustainability’.”
Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media, University of California, Berkeley.

“Finally, a volume that does the job of providing a critical infrastructural perspective on the relationship between AI and sustainability. A must-read for anyone interested in the social justice implications of the current AI race.”
Lina Dencik, University Research Leader in AI Justice, Goldsmiths, University of London.

“After reading this fantastic collection of chapters – empirically-grounded and theoretically ambitious, always provocative – readers won’t consider AI without its tremendous impact on labor, governance, and the environment.”
Jean-Christophe Plantin, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, LSE.

This book assembles cutting-edge research in media and communication building upon and expanding perspectives on media infrastructure, addressing critical issues such as environmental impacts, economic concentration, and social justice – areas that have not been comprehensively examined under the umbrella term “sustainability” within discussions on AI. The authors explore novel perspectives on the entanglement of digital media, AI and sustainability discourses as they manifest in the shaping of futures with AI.

Anne Mollen is a postdoc researcher in Communication Science at the University of Münster.

Fieke Jansen is a postdoc researcher and co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam.

Sigrid Kannengießer is Professor of Communication Science at the University of Münster.

Julia Velkova is Professor of Media and Culture at Linköping University.

Inhalt

Chapter 1 : Introduction : De-Centring Artificial Intelligence and Rethinking Sustainability.- PART I : Elements, Materials, Resources.- Chapter 2 :Amazonia's Place in AI : Minerals and Mining as the Cradle of Infrastructuring.- Chapter 3 :Growing the Cloud at the Corner of the Atlantic : Fortaleza as a Digital Infrastructure Hub Amidst AI-Renewable Energy Paradigms in Brazil.- Chapter 4 : Aligning Energy Grids, Clouds and Public Values in Sweden.- Chapter 5 : Aquaculture, AI, and the Planetary Domestication.- PART II : Promises, Economies, Discourses.- Chapter 6 : The Cruel Optimism of the Sustainable Cloud : Fantasies and Futures of Microsoft Azure.- Chapter 7 : Narratives of Indispensability and Infrastructural Solutionism by AI Giants.- Chapter 8 : Alliance or Self-Reliance in New Geopolitical Technospheres AI Infrastructures in Poland .- Chapter 9 : Discursive Infrastructuring of AI in Russia : Yandex's Sustainability Reporting.- Chapter 10 : Entangled Sustainabilities : News Media Partnerships and Generative AI Market Power.- PART III Futures, Politics, Governance.- Chapter 11 : Not Seeing the Data for the Trees: How Ecological Metaphors Matter in Academic Discourse on Platforms and AI.- Chapter 12 : Responsiveness and AI in Environmental Governance : Infrastructures, Power, and Institutional Ca-pacity.- Chapter 13 : AI Infrastructures, Total Mobilisation and Decomputing.-Chapter 14 : More Compute for a Burning Planet? A Scarcity Approach to AI Infrastructures.- Chapter 15 : The Good Infrastructure: Digital Futures, Values and Friction.