Is the application of A.I. to empower fossil fuel industry awful in light of climate change?

[daviddao]

Artificial Intelligence is one of the fossil fuel industry's key technologies.

The first time I learned about this was by this article from the AINow Institute.

Vox just recently published an informative video about how Google, Amazon, and Microsoft having contracts with big players in the fossil fuel industry - even going so far in investing massive amounts of money in organizations that actively campaign against climate legislation, and promoting climate change denial.

At NeurIPS (our biggest scientific A.I. venue), several attendees of fossil fuel companies attended the conference and tried to hire A.I. people. (WiML (Women in Machine Learning) was even sponsored by Shell!)

Thank you sponsors 📣#WiML is thankful to our Gold sponsors @amazon
@Microsoft @splunk @Shell @IntelAI @unity3d
@NoodleAI @Twitter and @nvidia for all their support in making this event big.#WiML2019 #NeurIPS2019 🎉🎉 pic.twitter.com/KffOGEOqKd

— WiML (@WiMLworkshop) December 2, 2019

Just 20 fossil fuel companies are responsible for 1/3rd of all emissions. There is no scientific scenario where we can prevent the climate crisis without rapid decarbonization.

Question: Can we consider A.I. applications for the fossil fuel industry as awful? Would it make sense to create a new category?

[KOLANICH]

Νο more than application A.I. to healthcare and food industry (no humans - no problems ;).

[daviddao]

Resolved with https://github.com/daviddao/awful-ai/commit/9ef9a5fb7362bed02bb2b1c85e625b096c1fc7d1