We are having the wrong conversations about AI | Opinion

We are having the wrong conversations about AI | Opinion

Not only are the bodies and the souls of these AI workers being harmed, so is the Earth from which the materials needed to power AI are being extracted.

We are still having the wrong conversations about artificial intelligence. While they are mostly what we would expect, they are not what we need. Predictably, these conversations have focused on questions of where to put data centers, how to pay for them, and how to use AI ethically. This is understandable given all the hype around AI, the demands that it be integrated into all that we do, and the economic resources being poured into AI and adjacent areas. But still, it is disappointing.

We should be concerned about much more than whether our community will be saddled with the expense of building and running a data center or how to use AI in our workspaces and classrooms. What is at stake is the dignity of humanity itself and the need to safeguard the human person in the age of AI. Yet not enough is being said about what this means. Nor is enough being said about the harms inflicted upon the Earth by the use of AI in all its current forms.

Regardless of whether AI is used constructively or destructively — by students, employees or the government — it harms people and the Earth. As Pope Leo XIV writes in Magnifica Humanitas, every seemingly innocent or supposedly ethical use of AI is “the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people.”

AI employees are young people working under demanding conditions

Although these long chains are made to remain as invisible as possible, they are nevertheless very real. Behind our use of AI lies “the silent work of millions of people” labeling data, training models, and moderating content. These workers are “young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages.” Alongside these workers are others who toil under even harsher conditions “extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends.” Not only are the bodies and the souls of these workers being harmed, so is the Earth from which the materials needed to power AI are being extracted.

There is no (ethical) use of AI that avoids these harms. And there is no way to build data centers that avoids harming people and the Earth. Perhaps a form of consequentialism or instrumentalism can accept these harms in the name of a possible greater good in some nebulous future, even if this greater good is not for a greater number. But no one who pays more than lip service to the inalienable dignity of each person or who recognizes the call to care for our common home can use AI or, for that matter, other industrial technologies with a clean conscience.

There is nothing those in Silicon Valley would like more than for us to continue having conversations about the supposed ethical use of the products they peddle. Nor will they truly be troubled by any local opposition to a data center they can build elsewhere. As long as we keep having these conversations, we will fail to have the more important and more pressing conversations about the human and global environmental costs of their current and planned technologies. As long as we keep having conversations about the ethical use of systems that have been designed and are unavoidably used in ways that treat some lives and some lands as less worthy than others, we will continue to fail to care for our vulnerable (and venerable) brothers and sisters and to care for our common home.

Possible future payoffs do not justify present harms

The right conversations about AI would revolve around how we can put an immediate end to practices that harm people and the Earth. These conversations would not begin with the tacit acceptance that possible future payoffs justify present harms — particularly when those who are unlikely ever to benefit from any current “developments” are required, without being asked, to bear the burden of these supposed benefits.

Not only must there be no more building — of data centers, of chatbots, of more powerful algorithms — until such building occurs without harming people and the earth. We must also cease to use those systems that we know to cause harm. Their continued use places barriers in the way of our living in solidarity with our marginalized and oppressed brothers and sisters and in harmony with the Earth. And we must begin the work of deconstructing these systems if there is to be any hope of building just and sustainable new systems.

The fact that we find ourselves in a bind — dependent not only upon the continued functioning of these systems, but upon our participation in them — relieves us of neither the responsibility to strive to break the chains that bind us nor the duty to work for a more just and sustainable world.

Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček are faculty members at Marquette University.