Call for Papers:
Rethinking the Inevitability of AI: Historicizing Computing’s Climate Impact alongside AI’s Past and Potential Future
300-500 word paper proposals due: April 22, 2024
Date of online conference: July 18, 2024
In late 2023, news broke that Microsoft was looking into developing in-house nuclear reactors to power their forays into AI. According to the International Energy Agency, data centers may be on track to double their energy usage by 2026 thanks in large part to AI and other power-hungry computing applications.
At the same time, companies globally have begun pushing their free or low-cost “AI” tools to consumers, on many college campuses, and in K-12 education. Many instructors have come under intense pressure to “integrate” these largely untested, energy hungry tools into their teaching, while multiple industries have undergone premature labor corrections due to the expectation that AI will soon diminish the need for workers.
To date, the burgeoning demand for power and water to support data centers across the U.S. and globally has occasionally made headline news, but the impacts on the environment are usually overshadowed by the tech industry’s need for more power, both literally and figuratively.
We will convene a one-day conference for the purpose of historically contextualizing AI and computing with respect to the environment, highlighting work that helps us better understand this history, and our potential futures. This conference looks at the past, present, and future of computing with regard to computing infrastructure’s impacts on the natural environment, the built environment, energy consumption, and water use. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Mél Hogan and Tamara Kneese, who will keynote the conference, and journalists such as Karen Hao and Chris Stokel-Walker, among others, this online conference will create a space to share new work on computing infrastructure’s past, present, and future, and all the ways in which the AI winter and current AI boom have changed this landscape.
From discussing the histories of computing infrastructures that have enabled AI, to the history of computing and the environment, to current concerns and potential best practices for energy and water consumption as AI technologies continue to ramp up, this conference will be an attempt to bring historians, scholars of media, public policy workers, journalists, and others into fruitful conversations about what threatens to be a sea change in how computing infrastructures function, and how large a share of natural resources they consume. Proposals about computing infrastructures and their histories, the history of computing as it intersects with the environment, the history of AI, and all other relevant topics welcome.
Proposals to present at the conference are due April 22nd 11:59PM ET. Please email a 300-500 abstract and paper title, along with a short bio (no more than 50 words) to this email: proposals@virginia.edu
The conference will take place July 18, 2024, in an online format, timed to accommodate multiple times zones but based in the Eastern Time Zone of the U.S.
Papers do not need to circulated in advance of the conference. There will be an opportunity for those interested to potentially contribute to a special issue of a journal or an edited book volume after the conference.
If you have any questions, please contact Mar Hicks at mhicks@virginia.edu
Thank you,
Mar Hicks and Erik Linstrum, co-conveners
Conference funding provided by the Environmental Institute of the University of Virginia, the UVA History Department, and the UVA School of Data Science