Tech Won’t Drill It. Nearly 50 machine learning researchers wrote an open letter asking big tech companies to stop selling their AI products to fossil fuel companies:
As new applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to problems in the physical sciences emerge, many such innovations are being used to accelerate fossil fuel exploration and development projects[, …] leading to “automating the climate crisis.”
Momentum around this issue has been building up for a few months, recently through
this Vox video highlighting that major tech companies are actively courting oil companies to use their machine learning products for fossil fuel exploration. Roel Dobbe and Meredith Whittaker,
writing for the AI Now Institute in October 2019:
As the letter notes, this is especially egregious next to the publicity spotlight these same companies put on the climate-focused AI work—the very work I highlight in this newsletter twice a month. The pledge therefore “[urges] tech and oil companies to stop exploiting AI technologies to facilitate and accelerate fossil fuel exploration and extraction.” I’d be surprised if dropping these verticals would represent more than a drop in the bucket for these companies’ bottom lines, and I sincerely hope that groups like
Google Workers for Action on Climate and
Amazon Employees For Climate Justice can push for them to do so.
Signers of the pledge include Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio, Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford of the NYU AI Now Institute, and many university professors and researchers. I’ve signed it as well, and if you work in artificial intelligence—at any level; I’m just an ML Engineer!—I think you should fill in the Google Form to sign too:
Tech Won’t Drill It—No to AI for Fossil Fuel Exploration and Development.