Rethinking sustainable AI: Labor and environmental perspectives from the global south
Controversies in the Data Society 2026
Abstract
“Sustainability” is a kaleidoscope concept to overshadow Artificial Intelligence (AI) corporations’ predatory activities, strategically positioned in environmental reports to divert attention from the material aspects of AI’s networks of production and value chains. Sustainability is often semantically associated with preservation and/or longevity of organic and inorganic systems. In the spectrum of climate change and environmental preservation, sustainability has gained traction in promoting actions that could revert the societal and environmental impacts of human actions embedded by the Anthropocene. However, as any mainstream concept and buzz word, sustainability might be used to overshadow a myriad of meanings and a part of them tailored to cover environmentally damaging activities sponsored by private corporations and companies worldwide: a phenomenon broadly known as green washing. When it comes to AI, the corporate promises regarding AI data models often fall around the premise of AI being a green industry or technology. However, AI is far from being green or sustainable if we consider the material aspect of its networks of production. Yet AI environmental reports still insist on the green technology narrative by articulating the sustainability kaleidoscope to AI, a metaphor we deploy to explore how “sustainability” can give an illusion of depth when articulating mirror concepts, which brings to the fore the impression of an environmentally sound agency without providing evidence of how these actions have taken shape.
Speaker
Beatrice Bonami is a Brazilian STS scholar. She has multi-country experience in a variety of multicultural settings, including government, educational environments, and indigenous territories. Dr. Bonami holds a Ph.D. in STS and Information Sciences by the University of São Paulo (Brazil), University College London (United Kingdom), and Universita La Sapienza di Roma (Italy).
She held numerous research grants during her academic professional career including prestigious funding cycles with the the UKRI (2025-2030), the DFG (2024), the DAAD (2023-2025), the Volkswagen Stiftung (2023), the Mozilla Foundation (2022), the Internet Society (2021), the Alan Turing Institute (2019-2020), CAPES/CNPq (2015-2019). Alongside smaller institutional grants from the Universität Tübingen, the Max Planck Institute, the Universiteit von Amsterdam and the University of Edinburgh.
Currently she is leading the research on AI environmental at the Planetary AI project, cultural and social impacts in the Global South, held by the University of Edinburgh (EFI/SPS), led by the UKRI.
Her work focuses on the value chains of AI under a planetary perspective and the associated disruptions associated with AI’s critical infrastructures. For this project, she is coordinating the ethnographic field work in South America (Brazil and Colombia), Africa (Kenya and South Africa) and Asia (India).
For previous projects, she has coordinated ethnographic research in the Amazon Rainforest (Brazil and Venezuela), West Africa (Senegal, Gambia and Mali) and East Africa (Rwanda, the DRC and Kenya).
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Header Image: Titlecard from the seminar.
