Have you ever persisted in following your SatNav even when you knew you were going in the wrong direction?
If so, you’ll know that placing all your trust in a machine powered by AI, without also engaging your own intelligence, does not always get you where you want to go.
This is the message that a group of conservation scientists at Cambridge is pushing hard.
Efforts to protect the natural world need all the help they can get - but before embracing AI as the solution, we need discussions about its risks and wider implications.
Saviour or downfall?
The most obvious issue is that AI’s high demand for energy and physical infrastructure could directly undermine conservation goals. It works on huge amounts of data, which requires supercomputers, technical skills, and a constant supply of electricity - all more likely to be available in the Global North.
“We need to prevent the concentration of power in conservation. People in the poorer Global South, where many of the planet’s important ecosystems are located, are most likely to be affected by conservation but they’re also least likely to have access to AI infrastructure,” says Reynolds. “It isn’t equitable to take information from studies in the Global South, use it to develop and train our AI models, and then dictate how land and resources are managed there.”
The researchers are also concerned about funders prioritising conservation projects involving AI, due to their novelty. “That will be a surefire way to prioritise projects led by elite institutions in the Global North, steering resources away from fundamental work that already struggles to attract funding,” says Reynolds.
