On Saturday I was asked to deliver a keynote address (and some other activities):
Walsh, John, “The Power Duo: AI and Sustainability,” keynote address given at the G.L. Bajaj Institute of Management and Research Marketing Summit 2024 (Noida: April 20th, 2024).
Here I am lighting the lamp of enlightenment:
Here is the text of what I said:
Distinguished guests, professors, colleagues, students, ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to begin by thanking the organizers and particularly Professor Surabhi Singh for giving me the opportunity to address you here today.
I speak to you at a time of both optimism and pessimism. I follow Gramsci’s dictum that we should exercise pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will. Pessimism because we need to be able to apprehend the world as it really is and understand all the misery being suffered and all the inequities being inflicted. But, also, we need the optimism to believe that we are capable of making a difference, of causing things to be better, at least in some ways.
In terms of pessimism, there is a great deal to see: there is a land war in Europe, which I had hoped I would never have to see again. There is a real danger of conflagration in the Middle East. There is war in Sudan. The threat of environmental degradation is engulfing the world and the climate change emergency is bringing about increasingly obvious changes. I could speak of numerous other issues.
However, we should balance this with our optimism about the things that we can change for the better. Two of these are issues I have been asked to speak about today – the twin giants of sustainability and artificial intelligence or AI. These are certainly issues that are revolutionizing the ways we think about doing business these days and, particularly, we do our marketing and think about the ways we communicate with our stakeholders.
These are not issues which we should accept unequivocally. AI, for example, requires in its current form on the collation and analysis of large language models. This is being attempted by an unknown number of actors, each of which is consuming and incredible amount of energy in the act of creation. It seems more likely that the number of actors pursuing their own AI models will increase rather than decrease and the amount of energy consumption will likewise increase. Moreover, it is far from clear that the more ubiquitous appearance of AI in our lives will bring about the benefits that is being claimed for it. The arrival of the internet was, according to some commentators, going to bring about a new age of democratization, of the benefits of free access to information and the possibility of personal creativity improvements. Yet those benefits have not been realized, at least not for everybody. Is it the case that AI will reinforce existing inequalities rather challenging them? That depends on who controls the AI tools. And who will control them? Currently, the situation does not look promising. The internet gave us the nationalist Myanmar monk Wirathu and the campaign of hate against the Rohingya people. It has given us Russian botfarms working for the re-election of Donald Trump and for Brexit. It will take robust and effective regulation to try to ensure that AI will not just give us more of the same.
Yet great things are possible. There is scope for AI applications to find lines of antibiotics or the cure for cancer. Doctors can have AI assistants that can keep up to date with all the most contemporary research and thereby make better and quicker diagnoses. Two days ago, I was reading about the sustainability of our taste in fish. In the UK, my home country, we now have a situation where 80% of seafood consumption is accounted for by just five species, most of which have been imported. Most of the species our fishers do catch is not wanted by consumers and are exported or just wasted. A similar situation exists here in India – busy consumers do not know what to do with some of the unfamiliar species (the recipes known to previous generations have been lost in the hurly-burly of life today) and so fishers must return to the seas again and again to earn enough to survive. At least part of this problem could be solved by the rapid provision of suitable information about what to do with the other species and the availability in the same shop or purchasing space of any additional ingredients that night be needed.
There are numerous examples of this form of minor market failure which might be addressed in this way. Taking advantage of the Internet of Things, such small interventions might be handled without human involvement.
There is plenty of evidence to show that people are willing to pay mor for products that are more environmentally sustainable and to reward companies that practice sustainable production processes if they have information about them.
These are small examples of course and they must be set against the significant disruption that will b created in the form of job losses and the restructuring of existing jobs. I am sure I am not the only one her who has been reviewing my daily and weekly activities and wondering how many of them could be just as well be completed by an AI replacement that does not need to be paid or asks for time off or a better office.
Nevertheless, these are ways in which some sustainable (or less unsustainable) forms of production and consumption are already emerging from the use of AI. As Bourdieu would have said, AI is becoming part of our habitus – our everyday relationship with the outside world and the way in which we view and interact with that world. The real-time alert of the implications of personal decisions (and, of course, decisions taken at an organizational level) will nudge many into taking the more responsible course.
It is wrong, I think, to lay the responsibility for averting disaster at the feet of individuals when it is the actions of a relatively small number of corporations, many in the extractive industries, and their enablers, who have done so much to bring about the current situation. However, embedding this process into all decision-making, if it can be done – if it can become as Foucault called it, a technology of the self – will be something od a corrective to our current course and is, therefore, a cause for some optimism – with which I shall conclude.
Thank you.
John Walsh, Krirk University
Ladprao 64 