2024-06-12 –, Room A - IJzaal
:warning: This session containscontent that some viewersmay find distressing. Viewer discretion is advised.
Every message you send, show you stream and podcast you download carries a cost to the climate. By how much? Cars have tailpipes and factories have smokestacks but computers have neither. The environmental cost of making hardware and using software is often abstracted away. AI is complicating the issue: artificial intelligence requires significant energy to train and companies creating these tools, in many cases, hide how much. How can we improve what isn’t measured? We talk with Maya Richman, Benoît Courty, Lea Wulf and Esther Mwema about ways to reveal the internet’s invisible carbon footprint.
Xavier Harding is a former journalist, current content producer and the host of this year’s MozFest climate justice panel: Revealing the Internet's Invisible Carbon Footprint. At Mozilla Foundation, Xavier writes about issues concerning tech’s effect on society and the people that live within it — from how test proctoring software struggles to see dark-skinned faces to the ways AI acts with the same biases humans do. More recently, Xavier has focused on the ways everything we do online emits carbon and the lack of transparency around exactly how much. Xavier spends an embarrassing amount of time on the puns and jokes in his writing. So far it hasn’t paid off.
Maya is a jack-of-all trades who has spent the last ten years listening and learning about the plurality of struggles for technological justice across the world, and supporting activists and organizations to untangle technologies’ hold on our lives and reclaim its power to bring about social and political transformation. She is currently the co-lead of the Green Screen Coalition. She has previously worked with The Engine Room, as a Mozilla Fellow (2018 - 2019) with Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and as consultant with Ariadne Network leading the Digital Power Programme.
Benoît is a member of the Tech Team of Data For Good France, where he discovered CodeCarbon in 2020, and became one of its main contributors. Last year, with other french contributors, he founded a non-profit to support CodeCarbon and has been elected as its President. He works as a data scientist at the French National Assembly.
Lea Wulf is a project manager at the Center for Digital Society at Stiftung Mercator, where she co-developed the foundation’s work on the intersection of digital transformation and climate action. Previously, she coordinated an AI network at a regional business association in northern Germany. Lea studied Political Science, Communication and Media Studies at the Universities of Bremen and Helsinki and holds a Master's degree in Political Management and Public Policy from the NRW School of Governance at the University of Duisburg-Essen
Esther Mwema is an award-winning artist and digital inequalities expert, working at the intersection of art and technology. She has over a decade of experience working at the high level, such as at the UN, and at the grassroots level with her organization Digital Grassroots which works to increase digital citizenship in underrepresented regions. She serves as an Advisory Board Member of the Digital Democracy Initiative. She recently co-authored the paper ‘Undersea Cables in Africa: New Frontiers for Digital Colonialism.’ Esther is an awardee of the Mozilla Creative Media and the Green Screen Coalition awards.