The sharply increasing sizes of artificial intelligence (AI) models come with significant energy consumption and environmental footprints, which can disproportionately impact certain (often marginalized) regions and hence create environmental inequity concerns. Moreover, concerns with social inequity have also emerged, as AI computing resources may not be equitably distributed across the globe and users from certain disadvantaged regions with severe resource constraints can consistently experience inferior model performance. Importantly, the inequity concerns that encompass both social and environmental dimensions still remain unexplored and have increasingly hindered responsible AI. In this paper, we leverage the spatial flexibility of AI inference workloads and propose equitable geographical load balancing (GLB) to fairly balance AI's regional social and environmental costs. Concretely, to penalize the disproportionately high social and environmental costs for equity, we introduce $L_q$ norms as novel regularization terms into the optimization objective for GLB decisions. Our empirical results based on real-world AI inference traces demonstrate that while the existing GLB algorithms result in disproportionately large social and environmental costs in certain regions, our proposed equitable GLB can fairly balance AI's negative social and environmental costs across all the regions.

"The machines are coming for our jobs!" How many times have you heard someone say some version of this? "We're all going to be replaced with automation!" Or, "It's just a matter of time before they give my job to a robot or a machine." While it's true that AI is developing rapidly, maybe, just maybe, our fears about the irrelevance of humanity are just a bit to premature? On this episode, we heard from Stephen Fioretti, VP, CX ISV Strategic Alliances at Oracle, about AI. What we talked about: The future of AI and customer service.