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Paper short abstract

The "twin transition" is promising more sustainable energy and production systems. Yet the infrastructures enabling AI involve high energy demand, changes in labor and resource use. The paper explores tensions between AI’s sustainability promises and its material impacts.

Paper long abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly positioned as a key driver of sustainable futures. Within the European policy framework of the “twin transition”, digitalization and sustainability are framed as mutually reinforcing pathways toward climate-neutral and resource-efficient societies (EURAXESS, n.d.). AI is expected to play a central role in this process, for example, through optimizing energy systems as well as improving resource efficiency in production cycles. At the same time, the infrastructures that enable AI are associated with significant energy demand and material extraction. These infrastructures are systemically interwoven with toxic environments and unevenly distributed ecological burdens. Recent scholarship further stresses that digitalization and ecological transformation reshape labor and resource-use in interconnected yet tension-ridden ways (Brandl & Matuschek, 2024). Against this backdrop, the very premise of “sustainable AI” has increasingly been called into question, as attempts to reconcile the rapidly expanding use of AI with broader societal sustainability goals may involve fundamental frictions (Rehak, 2024).

Building on Van Wynsberghe’s (2021) distinction between AI for sustainability and the sustainability of AI, the contribution examines how the sustainability promises attached to AI intersect with the production of toxic materialities and uneven environmental exposures.

The paper argues that the twin transition should not be understood as a self-reinforcing pathway toward sustainability but as a process that requires careful governance and infrastructural steering if digitalization is to contribute to sustainable futures rather than producing new toxic environments.