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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that encounters between expansionist imaginaries of limitless scaling and restrained computational approaches attentive to ecological limits create epistemic trading zones in which actors negotiate how the material foundations of AI are understood as part of an ethics of design.

Paper long abstract

Even as methane gas turbines and nuclear power plants come online to power AI data centers, the specific environmental harms potentialized by the expansion of AI’s material infrastructure remain largely sidelined in the race surrounding AI. Against such a backdrop, this paper calls attention to encounters between expansionary visions of AI and communities advocating computational restraint as they attempt to generate epistemic resources with which to understand and intervene in AI’s materiality.

Such epistemic resources are currently being constructed and circulated within communities gathered around such concepts as digital sufficiency, digital sobriety, and permacomputing, among other conceptualizations of computing otherwise. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with transnational networks of scholars and activists, alongside document analysis and ethnographic participation in meetings and conferences, this paper highlights what can be understood as epistemic trading zones (Galison, 1997): spaces in which actors from diverse computational backgrounds and normative commitments exchange calculative methods, affective responses to current AI developments, and manifestos calling for political and personal intervention.

By tracing these exchanges, the knowledge practices emerging through efforts to calculate, reduce, or otherwise reconfigure the consumptive relationship between expansionary computing and its environmental costs become central. In the context of friction-filled encounters with visions of industry-driven AI expansion, this paper explores how new forms of design ethics for computing are imagined and enacted when environmental concerns come to the fore.

This research is part of the ERC Advanced Grant project Innovation Residues: Modes and Infrastructures of Caring for Long-Term Environmental Futures (PI: Ulrike Felt, GA 101054580).