[Paper Review] An Elemental Ethics for Artificial Intelligence: Water as Resistance Within AI's Value Chain

Sebastián Lehuedé|arXiv (Cornell University)|Mar 11, 2024

Ethics and Social Impacts of AI9 citations

TL;DR

The paper develops an elemental ethics of AI, framing water as resistance within the AI value chain and drawing on grassroots and Indigenous activism in Chile to critique environmental harms of AI infrastructure.

ABSTRACT

Research and activism have increasingly denounced the problematic environmental record of the infrastructure and value chain underpinning Artificial Intelligence (AI). Water-intensive data centres, polluting mineral extraction and e-waste dumping are incontrovertibly part of AI's footprint. In this article, I turn to areas affected by AI-fuelled environmental harm and identify an ethics of resistance emerging from local activists, which I term 'elemental ethics'. Elemental ethics interrogates the AI value chain's problematic relationship with the elements that make up the world, critiques the undermining of local and ancestral approaches to nature and reveals the vital and quotidian harms engendered by so-called intelligent systems. While this ethics is emerging from grassroots and Indigenous groups, it echoes recent calls from environmental philosophy to reconnect with the environment via the elements. In empirical terms, this article looks at groups in Chile resisting a Google data centre project in Santiago and lithium extraction (used for rechargeable batteries) in Lickan Antay Indigenous territory, Atacama Desert. As I show, elemental ethics can complement top-down, utilitarian and quantitative approaches to AI ethics and sustainable AI as well as interrogate whose lived experience and well-being counts in debates on AI extinction.

Motivation & Objective

• Motivate the study by highlighting the environmental harms of AI infrastructure and its value chain.
• Propose an elemental ethics framework that centers the elements and local knowledge.
• Show how elemental ethics complements existing AI ethics and sustainable AI debates.
• Examine whose lived experiences and well-being are counted in AI discourse and decision-making.

Proposed method

• Develops a conceptual framework of elemental ethics informed by environmental philosophy.
• Grounds the framework in empirical case studies of resistance to a Google data centre in Santiago, Chile.
• Analyzes lithium extraction in Lickan Antay Indigenous territory, Atacama Desert, as a case of AI-related resource harms.
• Connects grassroots/Indigenous resistance narratives to broader AI ethics debates.
• Argues for integrating elemental ethics with top-down, utilitarian, and quantitative AI ethics approaches.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How does an elemental ethics framework illuminate the environmental harms associated with the AI value chain?
• RQ2 What can grassroots and Indigenous resistance tell us about whose well-being is counted in AI ethics discussions?
• RQ3 In what ways do water, minerals, and other elemental relations shape the sustainability and ethics of AI infrastructure?
• RQ4 How can elemental ethics complement existing AI ethics frameworks and influence sustainable AI policy and practice?

Key findings

• Elemental ethics reveals vital and quotidian harms tied to AI infrastructure, including water use and mineral extraction.
• The framework foregrounds local and ancestral approaches to nature often undermined in dominant AI discourses.
• Empirical cases from Chile (Google data centre resistance) and Atacama lithium extraction illustrate how environmental harms intersect with water and Indigenous rights.
• Elemental ethics can complement top-down and quantitative AI ethics approaches by incorporating lived experiences and environmental realities.
• The approach prompts reflection on whose well-being matters in AI extinction debates and policy decisions.