While AI has a great potential to improve sustainability and address climate change, its use may also have a negative environmental impact, given the greenhouse gases emitted when training data and computation-intensive AI systems.

In this lecture, Dr Taddeo will present principles and recommendations to support a governance strategy to leverage the opportunities offered by AI for the climate crisis in a responsive, evidence-based, and ethically sound manner.

About the speaker

Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and is Defence Science and Technology Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Her work focuses mainly on the ethical analysis of Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity, cyber conflicts, and ethics of digital innovation.

Her area of expertise is Philosophy and Ethics of Information. Her research has been published in major journals like Nature, Nature Machine Intelligence, Science, and Science Robotics. Since 2019, she leads a DSTL (Defence Science Technology Laboratory, Ministry of Defence UK) funded research project on the Ethics of AI in National Defence.

Dr Taddeo has received multiple awards including the 2010 Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy, and the 2016 World Technology Award for Ethics. In 2018, InspiringFifty named her among the most inspiring 50 Italian women working in technology. ORBIT listed her among the top 100 women working on Ethics of AI in the world.

She is also one the twelve 2020 "Outstanding Rising Talents" named by the Women's Forum for Economy and Society. Since 2016, Taddeo serves as Editor-in-Chief of Minds & Machines (SpringerNature) and of Philosophical Studies Series (SpringerNature).

Abstract

In December 2020, the Council of the European Union accepted conclusions designed to address the "twin societal challenge of digital transformation and green transition", encouraging the European Commission to make the EU climate-neutral by 2050 by "leveraging digital solutions to enhance environmental protection [and] climate action".

Indeed, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address the climate emergency is one of the most compelling opportunities that digital societies have in this respect. While AI has a great potential to improve sustainability and address climate change, its use may also exacerbate ethical and social frictions already associated with AI and have a negative environmental impact, given the greenhouse gases emitted when training data and computation-intensive AI systems.

Because of this, Dr Taddeo argues that leveraging the opportunities offered by AI for the climate crisis requires responsive, evidence-based, ethically sound, and effective governance to become a winning strategy. In this talk, she will present principles and recommendations to support such a governance strategy.

Monash Data Futures Institute

The Monash Data Futures Institute is an initiative of Monash University, Australia’s largest university, and acts as the access point to Monash’s vast network of researchers, academics, engineers and scientists in AI and the data sciences. The Institute forms the nucleus of one of the largest cohorts of AI and Data Science researchers in the Asia-Pacific, with more than 400 researchers.

Partnering with industry, governments and not-for-profits at all levels to address the most pressing global and scientific challenges of our time, we emphasise a cross disciplinary approach to transformative change in health sciences, sustainable development, governance and policy.

Monash Prato Dialogue - Fostering Global Dialogue & Discovery in AI and Data Science

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