An Elemental Ethics for Artificial Intelligence: Water as Resistance Within AI's Value Chain

AI's environmental footprint extends far beyond energy use: The paper documents concrete harms including water-intensive data centres, polluting mineral extraction for batteries, and e-waste dumping as "incontrovertible" parts of AI's value chain—impacts that often remain invisible in mainstream AI ethics discussions.

Local and Indigenous communities bear disproportionate costs: The research reveals that communities in places like Chile's Atacama Desert experience "vital and quotidian harms" from AI infrastructure projects, yet their perspectives are frequently excluded from decisions about whether these projects should proceed.

"Elemental ethics" offers a different framework for AI responsibility: Rather than relying solely on top-down, quantitative approaches to sustainable AI, the paper identifies an emerging ethics rooted in grassroots and Indigenous activism that prioritizes direct relationships with nature and local knowledge systems over abstract calculations.

Current AI ethics debates overlook crucial questions of justice: The paper argues that discussions about "AI extinction" and sustainability often fail to ask "whose lived experience and well-being counts," suggesting that responsible AI requires centering the voices and experiences of those most affected by its environmental consequences.

Resistance movements are already defining what responsible AI should mean: Rather than waiting for tech companies or policymakers to solve these problems, affected communities are actively articulating their own vision of ethical AI grounded in environmental protection and respect for ancestral approaches to nature.