Documents Brevini, Benedetta 5 results

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as a solution to the greatest challenges of our time, from global pandemics and chronic diseases to cybersecurity threats and the climate crisis. But AI also contributes to the climate crisis by running on technology that depletes scarce resources and by relying on data centres that demand excessive energy use.
Is AI Good for the Planet? brings the climate crisis to the centre of debates around AI, exposing its environmental costs and forcing us to reconsider our understanding of the technology. It reveals why we should no longer ignore the environmental problems generated by AI. Embracing a green agenda for AI that puts the climate crisis at centre stage is our urgent priority.
Engaging and passionately written, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of AI, environmental studies, politics, and media studies and for anyone interested in the connections between technology and the environment."

"We are repeatedly told that AI will help us to solve some of the world's biggest challenges, from treating chronic diseases and reducing fatality rates in traffic accidents to fighting climate change and anticipating cybersecurity threats. However, the article contends that public discourse on AI systematically avoids considering AI's environmental costs.
Artificial Intelligence- Brevini argues- runs on technology, machines, and infrastructures that deplete scarce resources in their production, consumption, and disposal, thus increasing the amounts of energy in their use, and exacerbate problems of waste and pollution. It also relies on data centers, that demands impressive amounts of energy to compute, analyse, categorize. If we want to stand a chance at tackling the Climate Emergency, then we have to stop avoiding addressing the environmental problems generated by AI."

"The Black Box Society was one of first scholarly accounts to propose a social theory of the use of data in constructing personal reputations, new media audiences, and financial power, by illuminating recurrent patterns of power and exploitation in the digital economy. While many corporations have a direct window into our lives through constant, ubiquitous data collection, our knowledge of their inner workings is often partial and incomplete. Closely guarded by private companies and inaccessible to most researchers or the broader public, too much algorithmic decision-making remains a black box to this day. Much has happened since 2015 that vindicates and challenges the book's main themes. To answer many of the concerns raised in the volume in light of the most recent developments, we have brought together leading thinkers who have explored the interplay of politics, economics, and culture in domains ordered algorithmically by managers, bureaucrats, and technology workers. While the contributions are diverse, a unifying theme animates them. Each offers a sophisticated critique of the interplay between state and market forces in building or eroding the many layers of our common lives, as well as the privatization of spheres of reputation, search, and finance. Unsatisfied with narrow methodologies of economics or political science, they advance politico-economic analysis. They therefore succeed in unveiling the foundational role that the turn to big data has in organizing economic and social relations."

"Scholars in political economy of communication such as Vincent Mosco have showed how discourses around digital technologies have historically been constructed as modern myths with major references to utopian worlds and possibilities. Myths, conceived as the dominant ideologies of our time become powerful devices that normalise conventional wisdom into ‘common sense' thus making the conception of alternatives impossible. This chapter aims to analyse the ideological discourse on Artificial Intelligence and its relevance in legitimising the hegemony of capitalism. From its beginnings in the fifties, Artificial Intelligence has been surrounded by evocative claims about the imminent creation of a machine capable of surpassing the potentials of humankind. This chapter aims to establish what hegemonic discourse around the concept of AI is emerging in Europe and what are the myths employed to construct such discourse."