2025-08-08 –, MOMBASA (🗣️ ar, es, fr, sw)
Language: English
🎥 Session recording: https://youtu.be/lE5swmpnTGA?list=PLhV3K_DS5YfLPVASK2MANk6wSHgWmbULz&t=11405 🎥
Technological innovation is key to solving humanity’s greatest challenges. But Tech revolutions like Artificial Intelligence are double-edged swords, especially in addressing existential threats such as climate change. AI’s soaring energy demands strain power grids and risk deepening reliance on fossil fuels.
Greenpeace International and its Technology Department face the challenge of aligning their mission and the values of millions of supporters with Tech choices that can advance their cause.
How can a mission-driven organization harness cutting-edge technologies in a landscape dominated by Big Tech, whose interests often clash with its own? How do we ensure that biodiversity loss, community impacts, and excessive energy use don’t undo progress toward renewables, and that biases in AI don’t worsen the digital divide?
Technological innovation is vital to addressing humanity’s greatest challenges - including our existential fight against climate change, helping reduce carbon emissions in global supply chains, improving agricultural practices or developing alternatives to fossil fuels.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no exception. Putting ethics and moral debates aside - there is no denying that the untapped potential of AI can help us tackle the biggest issues of our time, provided it is harnessed properly and with the right guardrails in place.
If we are assuming that AI can contribute to addressing climate change - it is also making it worse.
This lecture brings to light the gigantic, exponentially growing, AI energy footprint (e.g. The use of energy for daily, global ChatGPT queries is similar to the average consumption of 100,000 average US households).
Greenpeace International will share some of its own work and that of its regional offices (e.g. see YouTube - Greenpeace East Asia: The Dark Side of AI), aiming to trigger reflections for like-minded organizations or everyday Wikimedians committed to tackling climate change issues, in a world where AI tools are inescapable. This session will draw from the unique perspectives of a Technology Department and its Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the heart of a global environmental organization, asking questions they are grappling with and offering avenues for navigating these complexities.
The session will aim to engage with the audience on AI and broader tech dimensions relevant to both Wikimedia and Greenpeace International, including exploring AI’s practical work impact (and limitations), its impact on deepening bias and discrimination, and on its potential to further widen the digital divide
Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens and Nexus, contrasts today’s digital evolution with organic evolution, by comparing the hundreds of million of years it took for the earliest cells of life to become dinosaurs and much (much) later humans, to the few decades it might take ChatGPT (the AI equivalent of early cells), to become an AI T-Rex (see:AI today is like an amoeba. Tomorrow, it could be a T-Rex / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfIzZjArtds)
This will be a chance for the audience to briefly press pause and reflect on changes, both huge opportunities and risks, unraveling at lightning speed as well as provoke a conversation on what role they can play in ensuring that AI does good and not cause harm to the planet.
- What other themes or topics does your session fit into? Please choose from the list of tags below.
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Campaigns, Product development, Storytelling, Other
- How does your session relate to the event theme: Wikimania@20: Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?
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Promoting learning between like-minded organizations sharing common core values, sharing knowledge and addressing fundamental questions relating to AI and Tech which we believe Wikimedians and Wikimedia will find directly relevant to their work.
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
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Everyone can participate in this session
- How do you plan to deliver this session? You will be asked to confirm this closer to the date in case of changes to the format.
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Onsite in Nairobi
- Should your session be selected for the program, do you agree to release your session and supporting materials on-wiki and on the eventyay platform under CC BY-SA 4.0?
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I agree
- Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is omnipresent and transforming the world. The increasing use of AI not only brings progress, it also introduces new environmental challenges.
- Chipping Point - Tracking Electricity Consumption and Emissions from AI Chip Manufacturing
Priscilla Chomba Kinywa is Chief Technology Office (CTO) at Greenpeace and a TED Speaker. A Technology expert with experience spanning over two decades, 6 continents and 70 countries.
Priscilla loves working in sectors that do good, and prides herself in enabling others to do good better through the capabilities that technological advancements provide us. She feels very strongly about giving young people every opportunity to thrive.
Her career has spanned the UN World Food Programme, UNICEF, DanChurchAid, ActionAid International and Greenpeace International.
While Priscilla doesn’t have any past formal involvement with the Wikimedia movement, she strongly connects with its values and has for example spoken about “Why a free and fair internet is more vital than ever” in a 2021 TED Talk, which garnered over 2 million views and is featured as a TED Podcast.
When she's not thinking about how people and technology can make the world better, you will find her spending time with her family as they toggle between their two homes of Kenya and Zambia.