Strengthening the Sustainability of Artificial Intelligence: Fostering Green Intelligence for a More Ethical Future

Significant and ongoing advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly helping the business sector implement new sustainability initiatives, even though AI brings with it a range of currently unresolved issues, ranging from the exploitative labor practices used to create AI to the discrimination (such as racial discrimination) generated by flawed AI algorithms. The environmental damage caused by AI is also a major concern, as the technology relies on the extraction of scarce resources and enormous amounts of electricity. This chapter argues that the greening of bounded AI needs to be undertaken by the business sector in order to enhance businesses’ sustainability efforts and address the current issues surrounding AI. Businesses are ideally placed to implement bounded AI and to green it in ethical ways. By extension, a failure to green and bound AI will likely result in financial, legal, and reputational damage for companies. A case study of NearMap, a company that provides high-resolution aerial imagery, and the steps that NearMap has taken to green the bounded AI that it has implemented in its operations, is used in the chapter to illustrate this argument.