Deb Raji Calls AI Safety Discourse Insular on Environment
Deb Raji replies to Miles Brundage on warnings about data centers and AI supply chains.
Deb Raji posted replies to Miles Brundage asserting that AI safety discourse has grown insular. She stated that Theodora Dryer warned about water and land rights issues since at least 2019, that Kate Crawford published on the AI supply chain in 2021, and that Karen Hao worked as an environmental reporter. Raji also noted work by Marie Therese Png, Ria Kalluri, and the Decolonial AI movement on supply chain exploitation. Brundage replied that he had cited Crawford in 2021 and given feedback on Stochastic Parrots, while acknowledging he may have understated the political centrality of these concerns.
Disappointed in how insular the "AI safety" discourse has become - Theodora Dryer has been warning about this exact issue (water/land rights + AI) since at least 2019, @katecrawford published her book on the AI supply chain in 2021, @_KarenHao was an environmental reporter first!
Very little about how AI safety is playing out is shocking to people who have been thinking about this stuff for a long time. The datacenter politics, on the other hand, are much more novel
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8 postsMarie Therese Png & @ria_kalluri have been working w/ indigenous organizers against data centers for years, the whole "Decolonial AI" movement (led by @shakir_za, @Abebab and others) was focused on supply chain resource exploitation, in the global south. *Many saw it…
@rajiinio The many saw it coming point is fair (+ seems like a good general heuristic tbh!). Re: insularity I acknowledge having blind spots though OTOH did e.g. coauthor stuff citing Crawford in 2021, gave feedback on Stochastic Parrots, etc. so maybe overstated my shock…
The slightly more nuanced version of my experience, FWIW, is something like - aware of environmental impact + water specifically as issues ppl were raising (as citizens + as scholars), though underweighted how politically central it'd be, + how broad-based-yet-also-localized…
@Miles_Brundage Yeah I think I was surprised to see this take coming from you, as someone I do find to be quite well read in this space. IMO the political centrality was the main argument coming from the "AI as supply chain" crowd; they've been quite vocal about that for at…
@Miles_Brundage Perhaps what you're alluding to is the scale of this as a mainstream issue outside of indigenous and global south settings, which is where a lot of the past work is focused. No one anticipated the extent of a future demand that would, eg. encroach on rural…
@Miles_Brundage But also honestly even I'm not sure that's true - folks like Theodora definitely saw our current situation coming. The unsettling reality is that we didn't listen as much to what they had to say or prioritize this perspective as much before it materialized at a…
