AI Diffusion, Disasters, Environmental and Social Change

Donatella Gatti and Julien Vauday

No 2025.5, Working Papers from International Network for Economic Research - INFER

Abstract: This paper investigates the transmission of environmentalist values among citizens in relation to the diffusion of generative AI devices. This diffusion occurs following races in which two strategies, i.e. Safe AI and Unsafe AI, are available to firms and adopted according to an evolutionary game framework. The adoption of Unsafe AI leads to disasters according to a probability associated with both technological and environmental damage. The latter is influenced by consumption patterns and social change resulting from the adoption of environmentalist vs. materialist values by future citizens. A new socialization channel is proposed, which operates through the interactions between humans and AI devices as role models. The interplay between AI diffusion and social change results in complex dynamics leading to multiple steady states. Based on risk-dominance, we show that a complementarity between Safe AI and environmentalism might emerge only if the endogenous disaster probability is higher than a threshold p.

Keywords: Environmental transition; artificial intelligence; AI races; social change; carbon tax; disasters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain
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https://infer-research.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/WP2025.05.pdf First version, 2025 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: AI Diffusion, Disasters, Environmental and Social Change (2024)
Working Paper: AI Diffusion, Disasters, Environmental and Social Change (2024)
Working Paper: AI Diffusion, Disasters, Environmental and Social Change (2024)
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