For a while, I thought I was looking for an AI board to join. What I was really looking for was a question worth asking.

Why I joined IEEE and co-created the Subcommittee for Ecological Regeneration and Planetary Care with Caro Ames and Dr Heather Wade.

For a long time, I had been asking myself: What type of ancestor do you want to be?

It is a powerful question. But I started to realise it didn’t go deep enough, because most of us, myself included, were still centring the human in the answer. Humans cannot flourish without the planet flourishing. That is not a footnote. It is the foundation.

And yet the AI ethics and governance conversations I was witnessing were still organised around human-centred design, a Global North lens, and a word I have grown deeply uncomfortable with: sustainability. To sustain means to maintain the same. We cannot sustain our way out of ecological and climate decline. We need different questions. And we need different people in the room.

There is also a fracture we rarely name. The people training our AI systems, in India, in Africa, across the Global South, are often the same who are most harmed by the ecological damage caused by data centres, the energy consumption, and the mining that powers those systems. Those who are the ghosts in the machine, training AI for the Global North to use, are being destroyed by the very systems they are building. That is a perverse cycle. And the conversations were moving too fast to pause and actually see it.

I joined IEEE because I wanted to be part of a different kind of conversation. One that is genuinely holistic, that includes the human and the more-than-human, that references traditional ecological knowledge alongside Western academic frameworks, and that is not driven by capital or the logic of techno-feudalism.

The IEEE Global AIS Flourishing Initiative exists to do exactly this: to translate flourishing into practical frameworks, metrics and tools across the full lifecycle of AI systems, so that the technology we build measurably strengthens both human wellbeing and ecological sustainability. Not as an afterthought. As the whole point.

When I met Caro and Heather, who felt this just as viscerally, something clicked. What we are building together is not about getting diverse voices around a table. The table is still bound by the rules of those who created it. The question we are sitting with is: how do we co-create something new? Something intergenerational, epistemologically pluralist, rooted in the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from it.

This is the work. And it is only just beginning.

Thank you, Iliana Grosse-Buening, for the introduction to IEEE, and thank you, you and Tamara Lechner, for co-chairing the IEEE Global Artificial Intelligence Systems (AIS) Flourishing Initiative, the canopy initiative for our sub-committee.

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