Can AI Be Ecomodernist? A Capability-Based Normative Assessment

The environmental impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are raising a heated debate in recent engineering ethics and environmental politics literature. Detractors assert that AI contributes to making global energy demand more unsustainable while clean energy technologies are not available to replace fossil fuels. Supporters argue that it can contribute to optimizing the use of clean energy sources such as nuclear fission power and to favoring its deployment. Yet no systematic frameworks exist to assess the net contribution of AI to solve environmental issues such as climate change or unsustainable freshwater use. In this paper, we propose and apply three normative criteria to justify to what extent AI can be incorporated as a suitable technology for making environmental sustainability and human development compatible. Specifically, we assess AI grounded on three normative three criteria. First is the ability to be an effective environmental conversion factor of wealth and commodities into human capabilities. Second is the ability to be an ecological stabilizer, or the ability to contribute to diminish human impacts on ecological systems. Third is the contribution of technologies to protect and extend human capabilities to levels of sufficiency. Overall, the contribution of AI to face global human development and sustainability challenges is ambiguous. Although not valuable in itself to meet human development and sustainability goals, AI can contribute to both indirectly. The argument can advance the debate on the benefits and drawbacks of AI and as such provide insights for engineers and policymakers.