A Mobility Data Justice Approach to Sustainability and AI

Description

This paper explores the nexus between AI and Sustainability from a social justice and mobility perspective. This helps understanding the multiple ways power and (in) equalities are transformed or amplified at the intersection of mobility and data, including implications for Sustainability and AI. How (climate change) decisions are taken, is intrinsically bound up with data, algorithms, and, increasingly AI, with many inequitable results.

Mobility Data Justice includes investigations of distributive justice in terms of access, accumulation and distribution of/to mobility and data, highly relevant to their use by AI, and with regards to moving towards more sustainable mobility futures. It also considers procedural justice in terms of who is included in the taking of decisions and the design of mobility and data infrastructures. If AI is increasingly blackboxing decisions making, this undermines the very notion of procedural justice. Mobility Data Justice also asks new questions around epistemic justice in terms of what counts as ‘mobility, ‘data’ and ‘knowledge’, and how it is applied to knowing the world – linking to current epistemic justice debates on AI and on climate change.

This paper also emphasises how environmental (justice) concerns are central to Mobility Data Justice, together with global and intersectional perspective of multiple scales and complexity, that embrace alternative ways of knowing that decenter Western perspectives on mobility, data and AI. This might include the impacts of high energy usage associated with AI and cloud computing, the processing of e-waste, and the ways in which greenhouse gases and polluting processes directly contribute to the displacement of communities who are subjected to environmental injustices and coloniality. These very groups are then prevented from accessing free movement across borders via discriminatory technologies of bordering and racialized exclusion. At this scale we can also think about planetary mobilities and the ways in which practices such as AI, space exploration, climate-change-related geoengineering, GIS visualization, and remote sensing have all entangled data gathering functions with control of earth and extraterrestrial systems, in ways that raise numerous mobility data justice concerns in terms of how such technologies are distributed, who will make procedural decisions about their usage, and what kinds of epistemic systems they empower or disempower.

Period	31 May 2023
Event title	Sustainable AI Across Borders : Bonn Sustainable AI Conference 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Bonn , GermanyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International