Towards Environmentally Equitable AI
This work addresses environmental inequity in AI for global stakeholders, introducing a novel dimension to AI fairness, though it is incremental in building on existing resource management approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of environmental inequity in AI systems, where current management practices lead to uneven environmental impacts across regions, and proposes equity-aware geographical load balancing as a solution to redistribute environmental costs fairly.
The skyrocketing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) has created an enormous appetite for globally deployed power-hungry servers. As a result, the environmental footprint of AI systems has come under increasing scrutiny. More crucially, the current way that we exploit AI workloads' flexibility and manage AI systems can lead to wildly different environmental impacts across locations, increasingly raising environmental inequity concerns and creating unintended sociotechnical consequences. In this paper, we advocate environmental equity as a priority for the management of future AI systems, advancing the boundaries of existing resource management for sustainable AI and also adding a unique dimension to AI fairness. Concretely, we uncover the potential of equity-aware geographical load balancing to fairly re-distribute the environmental cost across different regions, followed by algorithmic challenges. We conclude by discussing a few future directions to exploit the full potential of system management approaches to mitigate AI's environmental inequity.