How can AI accelerate the green transition?

In his essay The Gift, published in 1925, the sociologist Marcel Mauss emphasised the 'total' scope of the phenomenon of gift-and counter-gift-giving, noting that it 'expresses, simultaneously and all at once, all manner of institutions: religious, legal and moral (...)\,; economic (...)\,; not to mention the aesthetic phenomena to which these facts give rise (...).'' The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), which is suddenly and profoundly disrupting individual and collective lives, bears a resemblance to the ''total social fact'' described a hundred years ago. AI refers to technologies designed to simulate human intelligence, namely an ''automated system that (...) deduces, from received inputs, how to generate output results such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions that may influence physical or virtual environments.'' 4 (OECD). Having become central to human relations, AI relies on physical and globalised infrastructure and therefore, also has an impact on the environment. This paper analyses some of these effects and how they are perceived by society. This text offers an exploration of the links between AI and the ecological transition, seeking to identify new opportunities and constraints. To this end, it will identify the barriers to the ecological transition (1) and the environmental impacts attributable to AI (2). It will then go on to describe how to live in a constrained world (3) while AI accelerates scientific discovery (4) and profoundly transforms society (5).