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We chat to Friends Of The Earth about AI

We’re looking forward to welcoming Mary Stevens and Christian Graham from Friends Of The Earth to our event as part of Bristol Tech Festival on Thursday 10th October for our charity themed session.

Their talk is entitled ‘Flourishing with AI? Friends of the Earth’s experiments in AI for environmental justice

Does the arrival and super-fast development of generative AI technologies risk entrenching inequality and undermine efforts to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises? Or can we harness these technologies to unlock creativity and extend capabilities at the grassroots, whilst still influencing how they are developed?

So how do we engage with a disruptive technology like AI? Friends of the Earth Experiments team has been exploring this agenda since 2018.

This talk will cover:

  • Approach taken to developing a portfolio of experiments to shape the AI agenda – and an overview of some of those experiments;
  • FOE’s draft principles for working with technology;
  • Key challenges we see in harnessing the power of innovations like AI whilst enabling human and planetary flourishing
  • Role that people working in both the technology and environmental sectors can play in supporting this agenda.

ABOUT MARY AND CHRIS
Mary co-leads the Experiments Programme at Friends of the Earth and has been based in Bristol since 2018. Her role is to support people to develop ideas that can accelerate a just transition through a practical, test-and-learn approach. She has a particular interest in applying innovation to support the emergence of more resilient local communities – and loves the diversity of community-based creativity in Bristol.

Chris also co-leads the team, and lives in North Wales. His focus is on turning ideas into testable prototypes, and helping the organisation think about a range of possible futures. His interests are varied, but often tinged with technology. Outside of FOE, you can often find him teaching aerial hoop at his local studio.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christiangraham1/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-stevens-52645ba/

Mary and Chris very kindly answered a few questions giving us a sneak peak as to what to expect from their talk:

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey with sustainability to date?

Chris: My journey started young with a pivotal read being The Usbourne Book of the Future. It showed that the future was a choice but could be both sustainable and feature exciting technologies like solar. Later I raced through a copy of, The Monkey Wrench Gang, a fictional account of the early days of environmental activism. This cemented my belief that while a sustainable future wasn’t a given, getting there could involve fun and mischief.  I turned that belief into action over the course of several winters as a teen by planting 5,000 trees with the Conservation Volunteers. I still feel profound sense of contentment at seeing a newly planted tree.  After a meander through industry and the education sector in my 20s, I eventually ended up at Friends of the Earth.  Since then, I’ve variously led teams – mostly on the digital side of things and been involved in our campaigns in various capacities for much of that time. Around six years ago, I joined our Experiments team which I now co-lead with Mary.

Mary: Like Chris, I started young – with a primary school teacher who had us all drawing diagrams of the Greenhouse Effect in the mid 1980s. My first involvement with environmental justice campaigning started at secondary school – I started helping another student run a school Amnesty group (as a teen with a lot of opinions I was naturally drawn to an organisation campaigning on behalf of people who were imprisoned for voicing theirs) and that led me into campaigning against Shell’s activities in Nigeria. I started volunteering with my local Friends of the Earth group in my early 20s. After a similarly meandering career – including as a civil servant at Defra where I worked on community response to flood risk and started applying design-led approaches to policy work – I was lucky enough to join the Friends of the Earth team in 2018. There’s so much creativity in our communities – I’m really motivated by tapping into that to solve our big challenges. And I’m based in Bristol where I really appreciate the very active sustainability community; some of you will have met me at Green Tech South West events before.

It’s amazing for us to have Friends of The Earth along to our community, can you tell us a bit more about the ‘Experiments’ team that you lead?

We exist to help Friends of the Earth and the wider environmental justice movement navigate and respond to the big challenges that face us.  That involves us digging into topics that may become disruptive trends in the future or that are already showing signs of undermining (or sometimes accelerating!)  our mission to create a fairer, greener future.  We look to understand the system better to see if we can figure out if there is an intervention which we are uniquely placed to develop. Sometimes that looks like micro-funding innovative nature projects led by those often marginalised in environmental action, in others we’ll be catalysing our own interventions such as Postcode Gardeners. Often the interventions are small, e.g. our team’s insights contributed to Friends of the Earth’s response to a government consultation on UK tree cover, or in other case, we assisted a small social enterprise in applying for their first community transport funding (they are now a 20+ strong organization with a fleet of renewable energy powered EVs).  In every case, we try to keep in mind our team mission: doing now, what our communities need next.

How big a problem is (and could) AI be to undermine the climate crisis?

Clearly the last thing we need at this fragile stage of moving to a low carbon world (where we should be fighting to prevent every 0.1C of global temperature rise) is a new fast-growing source of emissions, like the new data centres on which AI relies, alongside their water and other resource impacts.  Our colleagues in Malaysia, for example, are deeply concerned about the risks of data centre expansion in the Johor region. The lack of accountability and transparency on the part of big tech companies in this area doesn’t help either.  Nor does the trivial nature of some AI applications. There are almost enough cat videos on the internet already, and so we probably don’t need AI generated ones.  If we are going to use AI, and most of us probably will –  let’s be mindful about its use.

Equally concerning is the potential for AI to act as an accelerant and amplifier of a wide range of scientific disinformation including in relation to climate change. This has been a big issue for our colleagues in the US, who’ve been lobbying hard with the Climate Action Against Disinformation campaign.

Chris is more of an optimist. He is relatively bullish about AI related emissions stabilizing, even substantially declining, in the longer term. For example, more AI inference will take place on low powered devices using specialized locally run LLMs – hopefully reducing the number of calls to cloud based and generalized services.  Creating all those new AI capable phones, however, is another story… Mary is probably a bit less convinced, and more concerned about an unregulated AI ‘arms race’ and the extraordinary power of capitalism to translate any ‘productivity gains’ into ever increasing demand for more.

What can we expect from your talk?

Some seamless tech wizardry from the brilliant GTSW team (as Mary will be in person and Chris will be joining via the magic of the Internet from rural North Wales). Broadly, we’ll be giving you a flavour of the whole range spectrum of our AI work, from how we are influencing a coalition of leading NGOs through the Innovation for Impact Network,  to our community prototypes, working with people like Ruth, a Bristol-based grassroots activist who is exploring the actual  roots of grass via a snailbot.  

How can people support your work?

As an organisation which relies on individuals for most of its income, a donation is always appreciated!  Also, look at our work on our website and reach out if you’d like to contribute to one of our existing work strands or suggest a new collaboration. We’re always interested in hearing new ideas over a cuppa, whether that’s in-person with Mary in Bristol or online with Chris.

Thanks to Chris and Mary for the chat!

Please do join us either online or in-person at the Scott Logic offices (6.30-8pm on Thursday 10th October) – RSVP here