(Apologies for cross-posting)
Dear colleagues,
We are excited to invite you to join our 1-day and in-person workshop "AI x Crisis: Tracing New Directions Beyond Deployment and Use", which will be held at Aarhus Conference 2025 and will take place on August 18, 2025. The submission deadline has been extended to June 25, 2025 (AoE).
This workshop focuses on the costs of AI, referring to the human and natural toll of AI systems, such as labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and perpetuated social inequality. Costs acknowledge the inherent and inevitable trade-offs in the development and use of AI systems, emphasizing the disproportionate burdens experienced in infrastructuring, improving, and maintaining AI and the need to account for and engage with various actors, especially those from the Majority World that tend to be overlooked in WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) conceptions of AI ethics. We invite position papers (2-4 pages, excluding references) on various forms of AI-related costs, and critical engagement with methods to approach and address these costs. Please see below for workshop themes and topics.
Important details
We are looking forward to your submissions! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at tianling.yang@tu-berlin.de. We would also appreciate it if you could share this invite with interested colleagues and networks.
Best Regards,
Tianling Yang (along with workshop co-organizers Srravya Chandhiramowuli, Jana Heim, Camilla Salim Wagner, Julian Posada, Alex Taylor, Rafael Grohmann, and Milagros Miceli)
Themes and Topics
We invite position papers (2-4 pages, excluding references) that engage with the guiding questions and topics below and welcome further perspectives.
Guiding questions:
- What different types of costs of AI are there?
- How can research communities meaningfully engage with AI-related costs?
Topics of Interest
- Human labor in AI production and use: What types of labor are integral to AI pipelines? What are their contexts, conditions, and characteristics? What types of costs arise from these labor practices?
- Infrastructures of computing: What are the consequences of the increasing and structural dependence on AI-related infrastructure controlled by tech giants?
- Environmental costs of AI: How can we measure, quantify, track, and visualize the environmental impacts the AI sector brings? How can we conceive of climate justice given the uneven distribution of benefits and environmental impacts in AI development and use?
- Alternative methods to engage with AI-related costs: What are the theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and empirical cases to strengthen negotiation, resistance, and re-imagining of AI costs and futures?
EASST's Eurograd mailing list -- eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net
Archive: https://lists.easst.net/hyperkitty/list/eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net/
Edit your delivery settings there using Account dropdown, Mailman settings.
Website: https://easst.net/easst_eurograd/
Meet us on Mastodon: https://assemblag.es/@easst
Or X: https://twitter.com/STSeasst
