YU Xue; HOU Maoxin; WANG Qian

Dalian University of Technology

"AI, Environments and Lived Experiences: How Has AI Changed the Idea of Environmental Ethics?"

In general, when the relationship between AI and the environment is discussed, it often involves how AI technology can be utilized to achieve protection of the environment and what are the ethical risks in using AI technology. This is an important question, but the issue we want to discuss in this article is how AI has changed previous notions of environmental ethics based on lived experience. The environmental ethics of lived experience is mainly concentrated in East Asia, and we take China and Japan as an example to analyze three key concepts: terroir, trajective, and the living flesh. Terroir is essentially a perspective on the environment rather than an objective object. From this, the environment includes both human feelings, emotions, and various metaphorical human meanings, as well as objective knowledge about the environment. In the context of terroir, Augustin Berque, a French-born Japanese human geographer, proposed trajective. Trajective is the dynamic process itself of continuous communication, of continuous flow of meanings, of continuous enrichment of the world. The living flesh is embedded in terroir and trajective. The living flesh is derived from the Japanese word なまみ, and has been used as a metaphor for a state in which people live in nature, in direct contact with nature with their physical bodies. The involvement of AI in the environmental field actually changes the experience-based conception of the environment. The informatization, processization, digitization, and algorithmism that AI represents replaces the world of terroir, breaks down the meaning of trajective, and separates the integrity of the living flesh. In response to these changes and impacts brought about by AI, this article advocates for a reclaiming of the important role of lived experience in environmental ethics, and that the valorization and preservation of terroir, trajective and the living flesh are key to reclaiming an experiential environmental ethics. AI can play a certain role in this regard, but it should also be limited to certain scales, which is the only way to realize the harmonious coexistence of human beings and the environment.

Bio

YU Xue (Ph.D.) is an associate professor in the department of philosophy at Dalian University of Technology. She was a visiting scholar at Delft University of Technology and is now visiting the University of Vienna. Her research interests focus on the philosophy of technology, ethics of technology, especially ethics of artificial intelligence, and ethics of robotics.