Doctorates

The Universities Australia and Australian Council of Graduate Research report 'Investing in PhD candidates in Australia' states 

Current risks to Australia’s research workforce 

Despite an increase in domestic PhD completions by 41 per cent from 2000 to 2023, enrolment has declined by 8 per cent from 2018 to 2023, highlighting a concerning trend amid growing population demands. At the same time, there is a significant pool of potential PhD candidates due to a 195 per cent increase in Honours degree completions since 2003. Addressing these challenges requires targeted financial support and structural reforms to make PhD study more feasible for both domestic and international students. 

The profile of Australia’s PhD candidates in 2024 

The typical PhD candidate in Australia is often older than expected, with an average commencement age of 34, bringing valuable work experience to their studies. Many candidates, especially women, pursue their studies part-time, balancing responsibilities that often extend beyond academia. This diversity in backgrounds and life stages enriches their research, but it also presents additional financial challenges, especially with limited access to government support.

Barriers to PhD study 

A strong job market, inadequate financial support and insecure employment prospects in academia have deterred many domestic candidates from pursuing PhDs. Cost-of-living pressures, coupled with the low base stipend ($32,192 in 2024, barely above the poverty line) are significant obstacles for potential candidates, particularly those with dependents or prior financial commitments. Additionally, PhD candidates are excluded from key government benefits like Parental Leave Pay, adding to the financial burden.  

International PhD candidates’ contributions and constraints 

International PhD candidates are essential to Australia’s research and development workforce, addressing critical shortages in fields such as engineering and information technology. However, the 10 per cent cap on international PhD candidates within the Research Training Program (RTP) limits the potential for more international students, particularly impacting regional universities that benefit from the population and cultural diversity brought by international students. The current model often requires universities to find alternate funding sources for these candidates — a challenge for smaller institutions. 

Urgent reforms needed: increasing the stipend and adding flexibility 

Universities Australia and the Australian Council of Graduate Research have long advocated for increasing PhD stipends — a need that has become urgent with the rising cost of living. Raising the RTP stipend would allow PhD candidates to focus on research and reduce financial barriers, thereby promoting equity and diversity in the PhD landscape. While universities can theoretically increase stipends, doing so without a larger RTP budget reduces the number of scholarships available. 

Additionally, RTP indexing lags behind inflation, leaving current stipends inadequate. In response, Universities Australia has previously recommended increasing the base stipend to $35,000 in 2025, along with an expanded RTP funding pool to maintain the number of scholarships. A more flexible RTP cap on international students would also allow universities to attract talent aligned with Australia’s research priorities. Noting that this recommendation was not delivered in the 2024–25 Budget, we now recommend a 2026 base rate of $36,000, estimating that this would cost the Government approximately $300 million over four years (an increase of just 5.8 per cent over current program funding). 

The need for Australian PhD graduates 

Australia’s PhD graduates are crucial for meeting research needs beyond academia, with many pursuing careers in industry, government and healthcare. The skills acquired through PhD programs — such as advanced research, problem-solving and analytical capabilities — are highly valuable across various sectors. PhD graduates are equipped to contribute to policy-making, enhance public services and address pressing challenges, reinforcing their relevance to Australia’s workforce and economic growth. 

Recommendations for reforms 

To secure Australia’s research future, we recommend: 

1. Financial support and equity measures for domestic PhD candidates — $300 million over four years1 • increase the minimum stipend to a sustainable level aligned with the cost of living, with regular indexation. • expand the RTP funding pool to cover the increased stipend while maintaining the number of domestic candidates. • extend eligibility for government-funded parental leave to PhD candidates. • remove taxation on part-time stipend scholarships to ease financial burdens. 

2. Enhanced support for international PhD candidates • raise the RTP funding cap for international students from 10 per cent to 20 per cent, especially for regions with critical workforce needs (no cost to Government). • increase the RTP funding pool to support additional international candidates without compromising the number of domestic candidates. (up to approx. $500 million over four years). These reforms will create a more resilient research workforce by improving access to PhD programs for top domestic and international talent, supporting Australia’s standing as a leader in research and contributing to national workforce and economic needs.

Current risks to Australia’s future research workforce 

Over the past two decades, domestic PhD completions have increased by 41 per cent, from 4,557 completions in 2000 to 6,447 in 2023, but this growth has not kept pace with the overall population growth of 41 per cent, or the 60 per cent growth in higher education enrolments. From 2018 to 2023, domestic PhD enrolments declined by 8 per cent (43,174 to 39,8012) even as the population grew by over 7 per cent. This decrease poses as a serious threat to Australia’s research and development capacity. 

At the same time, the number of Australian citizens or permanent residents eligible to commence a PhD is larger than ever before. There has been an 195 per cent increase in students completing Honours degrees (27,389 in 2021 compared to 9,297 in 2003), which are often a pathway to PhD programs. This indicates that there is a significant untapped pool of potential PhD candidates who could contribute to Australia’s research efforts with the right incentives. 

Universities

The 'Respect at Uni Interim Report' from the Australian Human Rights Commission states 

 The Australian Government Department of Education (DoE) has engaged the Commission to undertake a groundbreaking study into the prevalence, nature and impact of racism in Australian universities (the Study). The Race Discrimination Commissioner leads the Study. 

The Study aims to understand the prevalence, nature and experiences of racism at universities for both staff and students, at the individual and systemic level. At the conclusion of this work, the Commission will deliver comprehensive research findings and recommendations on how to effectively address and reduce racism, in all its forms, at universities. 

This interim report is the first deliverable of the Study. Its purpose is to outline how the Commission will undertake this work and provide initial insights that reflect stakeholder feedback, emerging themes and early issues for consideration. 

Part 1 provides an overview of the Study, its objectives, scope and deliverables. 

Part 2 is an environmental scan and analysis of recent developments in relation to racism in universities. 

Part 3 presents initial insights based on stakeholder feedback, expert advice, an environmental scan and desktop research. These initial insights have informed the Study’s research methodology. In its initial consultations, the Commission heard from First Nations and other negatively racialised staff and students that experiences of racism including antisemitism and Islamophobia are pervasive, and that systemic and structural racism is deeply entrenched within the university system. Themes emerging from consultation include the diverse nature of staff and student experiences of racism at universities, the dissatisfaction of staff and students with complaints mechanisms, the disjuncture between universities’ stated policies on racism and practice and the challenge of finding a common language and understanding around racism. 

Part 4 outlines the Study methodology and approach to data collection. Given the complexity of the research task, which involves investigation across all universities and various stakeholder groups, it is essential to establish a best practice approach that delivers cultural safety for surveys and fieldwork. The Interim Report will explain the crucial foundational work that underpins the success of the Study’s next phase. 

This Interim Report describes the establishment of the Study's governance and initial stakeholder engagement. Creating a solid conceptual framework, along with effective governance and stakeholder involvement, is essential for the success of the Study and the delivery of the Final Report. Achieving these foundations has been a top priority for the Commission. 

The Commission is undertaking this work with a strong commitment to anti- racism. The Study will centre lived experiences and perspectives, be designed and conducted through a trauma informed lens, facilitate cultural safety and will focus on the systemic nature of racism. 

Universities should foster a love of learning, challenge thinking and nurture talent. Underpinning this requires a culture of respect and inclusion and systems that enable safety and equality. Unfortunately, this is not the experience for all students and staff, with experiences of racism negatively impacting study and employment. 

Racism in universities is a long-standing problem, with research showing it is a persistent and systemic issue for students and staff from First Nations and other negatively racialised backgrounds. The broader socio-political context impacts the prevalence and patterns of racism in universities. First Nations communities experienced significant racism leading up to the Voice Referendum in 2023 and this has continued even following the result. 

Major world events also impact universities. Following the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli response, there has been an increase in reported antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. 

International students also report alarming levels of racism, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Racism in universities is certainly not a new problem, but action is long overdue. The severity of recent incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, combined with other experiences of racism across different groups, create an urgent need to act decisively. 

The first step in an effective response is a robust, evidence-based understanding of the issue. There is no comprehensive data collection of experiences of racism in universities and current evidence about prevalence is limited. The Australian Universities Accord recommended a Tertiary Education Racism Study. Recommendation 33 of the Australian Universities Accord Final Report, released on 25 February 2024, states:

That to contribute to making the tertiary education system as safe as possible for students and staff, the Australian Government conduct a study into the prevalence and impact of racism across the tertiary education system, on campus and online, guided by an expert committee with representation from a wide range of stakeholder groups, with the Australian Tertiary Education Commission tasked with leading the response and acting on the outcomes.

The DoE engaged the Commission to lead this Study. 

This groundbreaking Study will provide an independent, comprehensive analysis of the prevalence and impact of racism in universities. Given the lack of comprehensive data and evidence, this Study is critical to building understanding and developing concrete solutions. 

The Race Discrimination Commissioner leads the Study, with support from the DoE and the Attorney-General’s Department (AGD). The National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) is also providing advice on issues related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff and students. The DoE has allocated the Commission $2.5 million for the Study.

The interim report goes on to state

The Terms of Reference (Appendix I) outline the Study's objectives, scope, consultation, governance and timing. 

(a) Aim and objectives 

The Study will comprehensively investigate the prevalence and impact of racism in universities, establish a baseline of racism experiences and develop recommendations to create a safe, respectful and inclusive environment for all university students and staff. 

(b) Scope 

The Study has a wide-ranging scope and will identify prevalence and impact, including:

• The prevalence, nature and experiences of racism, including antisemitism and Islamophobia at universities for both staff and students at the individual and systemic levels. Universities with dual-sector operations that integrate higher education with vocational education and training (VET) are included in the scope of the Study. 

• Which cohorts of students and staff experience racism, including but not limited to the distinct incidences of antisemitism, Islamophobia and the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, people from other negatively racialised backgrounds and international students. 

• The unique context and circumstances of racism for different groups of students and staff, including a specific focus on the experiences of Jewish, Muslim and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and staff.

The Study will also conduct practical research to develop recommendations for the Government, universities and other relevant stakeholders to address racism and discrimination. 

(c) Research questions and approach 

The Study utilises a mixed methodology, combining quantitative and qualitative data from the survey analysis with qualitative data from survey responses, focus groups, interviews and roundtable discussions. The Terms of Reference establish the areas for inquiry and scope. These areas have been operationalised into specific research questions to guide research design:

• What is the prevalence, nature and impact of racism on university staff and students? 

• How do different cohorts of students and staff experience racism? • How effective are current responses to racism? 

• Do current responses sufficiently understand and provide targeted responses to the distinct experiences of different cohorts? 

• How can universities embed anti-racism into policy and practice? 

• What can we learn from national and international promising practice and prevention? 

• How can Government, universities and other stakeholders prevent racism and improve responses to racism?

The Study is designed with a strong commitment to anti-racism, including centring lived experiences and perspectives, trauma informed, facilitating cultural safety, intersectional and focusing on the systemic nature of racism. In addition, upholding privacy and ethical principles are also important components of the Study methodology. 

(d) Deliverables 

The Study deliverables will include:

• a robust survey instrument (and associated technical reports) for broader use across the tertiary education sector and as the basis for ongoing, longitudinal use in higher education 

• a comprehensive literature review 

• a report that includes Study findings and a series of recommendations for further work and/or action, for the Government and the university sector.

Conspiracism

'Conspiracy theory, anti-globalism, and the Freedom Convoy: The Great Reset and conspiracist delegitimation' byr Corey Robinson and Scott D. Watson in (2025) Review of International Studies comments

In this article, we analyse how anti-globalist conspiracy theories were mobilised online to delegitimise national authorities and policies designed to curb the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada. These conspiracy theories attacked the political authority underpinning public health measures and targeted purportedly ‘liberal’ policies and ‘globalist’ actors. Our case study examines the Freedom Convoy, a series of protests against Covid-19 vaccine mandates that began in Canada but inspired global demonstrations. The Freedom Convoy fostered and relied upon anti-globalist conspiracy theories, including the ‘Great Reset’ and ‘Great Replacement’, both of which posit a global conspiracy to erode national sovereignty and impose a ‘liberal’ international order. We investigate far-right social media commentary from 4chan’s Politically Incorrect imageboard /pol/, Infowars, and Rebel News, showing how conspiratorial claims were marshalled in alt-tech spaces. These narratives were used to delegitimise public health measures to combat Covid-19 and the Liberal Trudeau government by linking them to various ‘globalist’ forces. In exploring three mechanisms of delegitimation – externalisation, personification, and Othering – we argue that far-right movements like the Freedom Convoy, motivated by anti-globalist conspiracism, mobilise the international realm by leveraging the legitimacy gap of international organisations and agendas to undermine the political authority of actors at the national level. 

 

The Freedom Convoy (FC) began in January 2022 as a series of protests, blockades, and online campaigns opposing Covid-19 vaccine mandates for commercial truckers crossing the Canada–US border. The protests quickly evolved into a broader movement, both within Canada and internationally, against ‘globalism’ and various issues associated with liberal global governance. These issues ranged from vaccine mandates to intentional depopulation and world government. The FC, which united a loose coalition of far-right groups alongside vaccine sceptics, organised via social media and travelled across Canada to gather in Ottawa and at key border points. The movement mobilised far-right anti-globalist conspiracy theories to articulate its opposition to a range of measures associated with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the ‘Great Reset’. 

 

Using semi-trailer trucks, protestors established an encampment and demanded the repeal of public health measures and the dissolution of the Trudeau government. Sustained by the deafening chorus of honking from 400 to 500 semi-trailer trucks and supported by approximately $24 million CAD in online donations – 56 per cent of which came from the United States – the protests grew to an estimated 10,000 people in Ottawa’s downtown core, paralysing city services for over three weeks. The Ottawa protest sparked demonstrations at provincial capitals and blockades at numerous Canada–US border crossings. It obstructed at least 19 ports of entry, resulting in $3.9 billion CAD in lost trade activity. At the Coutts Port of Entry, along the Alberta border, police uncovered a cache of guns, ammunition, a pipe bomb, and body armour. Four protestors, some with alleged ties to Diagolon – a far-right accelerationist group – were charged with conspiracy to murder RCMP officers. 

 

Driven by anti-globalist conspiracies and extremist rhetoric, the FC and the Canadian government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act to end the protest garnered significant international attention, leading to smaller but notable copycat demonstrations worldwide. Countries such as Austria, Bolivia, Israel, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand saw groups rally against what they perceived as the authoritarianism of public health orders, framing the situation as a populist battle for ‘freedom’ against alleged government overreach and a ‘globalist’ agenda. In Wellington and Helsinki, vehicles blocked roads around Parliament, while Paris and Brussels took steps to prohibit anti-vaccine protests inspired by the FC. French police arrested dozens of individuals and intercepted vehicles heading to Brussels. In the United States, former president Donald Trump criticised Prime Minister Trudeau as a ‘far-left lunatic’ who ‘destroyed Canada with insane COVID mandates’. Senator Ted Cruz visited the ‘People’s Convoy’ in Washington, DC, to show his support, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vowed to investigate GoFundMe after the crowdfunding platform suspended fundraising for the protestors. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party and the official opposition in Canada, enthusiastically supported the FC as a popular campaign against Trudeau and the ‘gatekeeping elite’.  In his campaign to become the next prime minister, Poilievre continues to engage with many of the groups that participated in the Convoy and to weaponise conspiracy theories that found a discursive vehicle in the protests, such as the Great Reset. 

 

Focusing on the conspiracy theories surrounding the FC that circulated online, this article explores the question: how does anti-globalist conspiracism function in the delegitimation of political authority? Contextualising these transnational protests within broader scholarly debates about the global far right and populist internationalism, this article examines how far-right populists and movements have increasingly mobilised conspiracy theories to undermine national governments and ‘elites’ associated with ‘globalist’ institutions and agendas. 

 

Our analysis illustrates that the anti-globalist conspiracism surrounding the FC functioned discursively to delegitimise the political authority of the Canadian government (and public health measures like vaccine mandates) by associating them with international institutions and ‘globalist’ agendas held responsible for the pandemic response. As we show in the following sections, conspiracist delegitimation employs three primary mechanisms: externalisation, personification, and Othering. 

 

First, externalisation involves projecting problems of national politics onto the international level and attributing their causes to foreign actors, institutions, and agendas, to the exclusion of internal/domestic processes, policies, and complex, multilevel governance structures. This process redirects concerns about domestic issues onto representative figures of the global elite, delegitimising national actors (such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), international institutions (like the WEF), and agendas (such as the Great Reset). Of course, this is not unique to anti-globalism; identifying foreign, international actors as the driving force in history is a fundamental feature of conspiracy theories. External figures such as Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Bill Gates were prominent in the Convoy discourse, as was the general term ‘globalists’. Externalisation functioned discursively by linking public health measures and post-Covid recovery policies to international organisations such as the WEF, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations (UN). At the same time, externalisation obscured key factors that shaped the response, such as the division of federal and provincial powers, and the rejection of legitimate democratic processes and actors, which were discredited through their association with the legitimacy deficit of international institutions. Externalisation thus served to delegitimise democratic norms and procedures by mobilising the international and the legitimacy deficit of international institutions and agendas. 

 

Second, personification entails reducing various processes and structures to the actions of single individuals or groups – what Popper referred to as ‘psychologism’ in his early critique of conspiracism – a phenomenon also captured by terms such as ‘hyperagency’. Personification assumes that individuals hold near-total control over outcomes and that outcomes are always intended. Consequently, it attributes both unintentional effects and negative outcomes of impersonal and abstract structures to the intentional conspiratorial design of powerful individuals or groups, such as Schwab, Soros, or Gates. Domestically, Trudeau personified the Covid public health measures associated with ‘globalism’, while externally, Klaus Schwab of the WEF was considered responsible for the ‘Great Reset’. The focus on Trudeau, along with his association with Schwab, obscured the mistakes and unintended outcomes that contributed to the pandemic and simplified complex global processes into a narrative of intentional design by individuals. These processes, and the complex governance of public health, border controls, international trade, and supply chains in Canada, were reduced to the intentions of specific elites. By focusing on Trudeau and associating him with Schwab and the WEF’s Great Reset, anti-globalist conspiracism offered a simplistic diagnosis of the pandemic that challenged the legitimacy of the Canadian government and public health measures by discursively linking the prime minister to elitist, illegitimate, and undemocratic forces of ‘globalism’. 

 

Finally, Othering draws on racist, civilisational, and gendered discourses to identify those allegedly engaging in or facilitating conspiratorial behaviour intended to alter social norms and practices against the values and interests of the national community. Certain groups are consistently Othered in anti-globalist conspiracism, including Jews, homosexuals, and communists, either explicitly or through the use of coded language like ‘globalists’. As we explore in subsequent sections, the FC online narratives focused their discursive energy on these ‘Others’, with communists (Trudeau and Castro), women and homosexuals (globohomo), and Jews (George Soros) all featured in the discourse about the FC. 

 

Through an analysis of the anti-globalist conspiracy theories that discursively fuelled the FC, this article makes a twofold contribution to International Relations (IR). First, it adds to the emerging body of research situated at the intersection of IR, the global far right, and conspiracy theories by extending the study of anti-globalist conspiracism beyond the realms of populist foreign policy and far-right ideology to focus on alt-tech spaces, which are becoming increasingly influential in these movements. Second, this article advances the study of populist internationalism by highlighting the role of anti-globalist conspiracism in the FC’s resistance to the perceived forces of globalism, and by analysing the mechanisms of delegitimation directed towards national authorities, who were cast as front organisations for global elites. 

 

Before analysing the process of conspiracist delegitimation in the alt-tech space, the following section reviews the multidisciplinary literature on conspiracy theory. While existing scholarship identifies individual and cultural responses to globalisation, it has not sufficiently addressed the national and international political dynamics at the root of anti-globalist conspiracism. Subsequently, we examine the emerging scholarship on conspiracy theory in IR. We then turn quickly to the literature on the global far right, which has drawn attention to the internationalisation of the far right but has largely neglected anti-globalist conspiracism. Finally, before the empirical analysis, we outline our methodological approach.

AI Externalities

'The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI' byYuelin Han, Zhifeng Wu, Pengfei Li, Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren comments 

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has numerous potentials to play a transformative role in addressing grand societal challenges, including air quality and public health [1, 2]. For example, by integrating multimodal data from various sources, AI can provide effective tools and actionable insights for pandemic preparedness, disease prevention, healthcare optimization, and air quality management [1, 3]. However, the surging demand for AI — particularly generative AI, as exemplified by the recent popularity of large language models (LLMs) — has driven a rapid increase in computational needs, fueling the unprecedented expansion of energy-intensive AI data centers. According to McKinsey projections, under a medium-growth scenario [4], the U.S. data centers are anticipated to account for 11.7% of national electricity consumption in 2030, a substantial increase from their current share of less than 4% in 2023. 

The growing electricity demand of AI data centers has not only created significant stress on power grid stability [5,6], but also increasingly impacts the environment through escalating carbon emissions [7,8] and water consumption [9]. These environmental impacts are driven primarily by the “expansion of AI products and services,” as recently acknowledged by Google in its latest sustainability report [10]. To mitigate the challenges posed to both power grids and the environment, a range of strategies have been explored, including grid-integrated data centers [6, 11], energy-efficient hardware and software [12–14], and the adoption of carbon-aware and water-efficient computing practices [9,15–17], among others. 

The hidden toll of AI. While the environmental footprint of AI has garnered attention, the public health burden, a hidden toll of AI, has been largely overlooked. Across its entire lifecycle — from chip manufacturing to data center operation — AI contributes substantially to air quality degradation and public health costs through the emission of various criteria air pollutants. These include fine particulate matter (PM2.5, particles measuring 2.5 micrometers or smaller in diameter that can penetrate deep into lungs and cause serious health effects), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Concretely, the AI hardware manufacturing process [18], electricity generation from fossil fuels to power AI data centers, and the maintenance and usage of diesel backup generators to ensure continuous AI data center operation all produce significant amounts of criteria air pollutants. Moreover, the distinct spatial-temporal heterogeneities of emission sources suggest that focusing solely on reducing AI’s carbon footprints may not minimize its emissions of criteria air pollutants or the resulting public health impacts (Section 5). 

Exposure to criteria air pollutants is directly and causally linked to various adverse health outcomes, including premature mortality, lung cancer, asthma, heart attacks, cardiovascular diseases, strokes, and even cognitive decline, especially for the elderly and vulnerable individuals with pre-existing conditions [20–23]. Moreover, even short-term (hours to days) PM2.5 exposure is harmful and deadly, accounting for approximately 1 million premature deaths per year from 2000 to 2019 and representing 2% of total global deaths [24]. 

Globally, 4.2 million deaths were attributed to ambient (i.e., outdoor) air pollution in 2019 [25]. Air pollution has become the second highest risk factor for noncommunicable diseases [26]. Notably, according to the latest Global Burden of Disease report [27], along with high blood pressure and high blood sugar, ambient particulate matter is placed among the leading risk factors for disease burden globally in every socio-demographic group. 

While the U.S. has generally better air quality than many other countries, 4 in 10 people in the U.S. still live with unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to the “State of the Air 2024” report published by the American Lung Association [28]. In 2019 (the latest year of data provided by the World Health Organization, or WHO, as of November 2024), an estimate of 93,886 deaths in the U.S. were attributed to ambient air pollution [29]. In fact, even compliance with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality standards does not necessarily guarantee healthy air that meets the WHO guidelines. Concretely, the EPA’s recently tightened primary standard for PM2.5 sets an annual average limit of 9 µg/m3, considerably higher than the WHO’s recommended level of 5 µg/m3 [30,31]. In addition, the EPA projects that 53 U.S. counties, including 23 in the most populous state of California, would fail to meet the revised national annual PM2.5 standard in 2032 [32]. 

Further, criteria air pollutants are not confined to the immediate vicinity of their emission sources; they can travel hundreds of miles through a dispersion process (i.e., cross-state air pollution) [33,34], impacting public health across vast regions — pollutants from the 2024 Canadian wildfires significantly degraded air quality across much of the U.S. and reached as far as Mexico and Europe [35]. 

Importantly, along with transportation and industrial activities, electricity generation is a major contributor to ambient air pollution with substantial public health impacts [26, 36, 37]. For example, a recent study [38] shows that, between 1999 and 2020, a total of 460,000 excess deaths were attributed to PM2.5 generated by coal-fired power plants alone in the U.S. As highlighted by the U.S. EPA [36], despite years of progress, “fossil fuel-based power plants remain a leading source of air, water, and land pollution that affects communities nationwide.” Moreover, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projection [39], the coal consumption by the electricity sector in 2050 will still be about 30% of the 2024 level in the baseline reference case, and the number will exceed 50% in the high zero-carbon technology cost case. Indeed, the growing energy demands of AI are already delaying the decommissioning of coal-fired power plants and increasing fossil-fuel plants in the U.S. as well as around the world [6,40,41]. 

The public health outcomes of AI due to its emission of criteria air pollutants lead to various losses, such as hospitalizations, medication usage, emergency room visits, school loss days, and lost workdays. Moreover, these losses can be further quantified in economic costs based on epidemiology and economics research for the corresponding health endpoints [22,42]. In contrast, the environmental impacts of AI, e.g., carbon emission from fossil fuels and water consumption for data center cooling, often do not cause the same immediate health impacts. For instance, while anthropogenic carbon emissions could also pose risks to public health, such impacts are often second- or third-order effects through long-term climate change which can then threaten the human well-being by affecting the food people eat and facilitating the spreading of pests, among others [43]. Nonetheless, despite their immediate and tangible impacts on public health, the criteria air pollutants of AI have remained under the radar, entirely omitted from today’s AI risk assessments and sustainability reports [10,44,45]. 

Quantifying the public health costs of AI. In this paper, we uncover and quantify the hidden public health impacts of AI. We introduce a general methodology to model the emission of criteria air pollutants  associated with AI tasks across three distinct scopes: emissions from the maintenance and operation of backup generators (Scope 1), emissions from fossil fuel combustion for electricity generation (Scope 2), and emissions resulting from the manufacturing of server hardware (Scope 3). Then, we analyze the dispersion of criteria air pollutants and the resulting public health impacts across different regions.

Classroom FRT

'Cameras in the Classroom: Facial Recognition Technology in Schools' (2020) by Claire Galligan, Hannah Rosenfeld, Molly Kleinman and Shobita Parthasarathy 2020 comments 

 Facial recognition (FR) technology was long considered science fiction, but it is now part of everyday life for people all over the world. FR systems identify or verify an individual’s identity based on a digitized image alone, and are commonly used for identity verification, security, and surveillance in a variety of settings including law enforcement, commerce, and transportation. Schools have also begun to use it to track students and visitors for a range of uses, from automating attendance to school security. FR can be used to identify people in photos, videos, and in real time, and is usually framed as more efficient and accurate than other forms of identity verification. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that it will erode individual privacy and disproportionately burden people of color, women, people with disabilities, and trans and gender non-conforming people. In this report, we focus on the use of FR in schools because it is not yet widespread and because it will impact particularly vulnerable populations. We analyze FR’s implications using an analogical case comparison method. Through an iterative process, we developed historical case studies of similar technologies, and analyzed their social, economic, and political impacts, and the moral questions that they raised. This method enables us to anticipate the consequences of using FR in schools; our analysis reveals that FR will likely have five types of implications: exacerbating racism, normalizing surveillance and eroding privacy, narrowing the definition of the “acceptable” student, commodifying data, and institutionalizing inaccuracy. Because FR is automated, it will extend these effects to more students than any manual system could. On the basis of this analysis, we strongly recommend that use of FR be banned in schools. However, we have offered some recommendations for its development, deployment, and regulation if schools proceed to use the technology.

Venture Capital

'From blitzkrieg to blitzscaling: Assessing the impact of venture capital dynamics on military norms' by Elke Schwarz in (2025) Finance and Society comments 

 We are in the midst of a military AI bonanza. At security and defence trade fairs, artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as the inevitable and indispensable technology that will, with little doubt, determine the future of a state and its military effectiveness. Not least since Putin declared in 2017 that those who dominate in AI will ‘be the ruler of the world’ (Vincent, 2017) has military AI garnered the attention of policymakers, military strategists, and technology companies with a keen eye for an opportunity. AI not only serves a pathway towards more autonomy and lethality for weapon systems but is also seen in defence and technology circles as the key to winning any future war. For a number of years now the credo within the US defence sphere has been: ‘the only way […] to stay competitive in a new warfighting environment is to ensure that [the US] uses the most potent weapon available: technology, and more specifically software’ (Mulchandani and Shanahan, 2022: 19). This newly focused attention on AI is reflected in US military spending. Between 2022 and 2023, federal contracts for military AI have nearly tripled, with a potential increase in the value of these contracts by 1,200% (Larson et al., 2024). With defence budgets growing across the globe, the prospects for new military software-oriented startups to capture a share of an enormously lucrative market are better than ever. And where startups are active, venture capital (VC) is usually not far. 

With its recent turn towards US military business and technologies, venture capital is, in many ways, coming back full circle to its roots. Modern military innovation, Silicon Valley, and venture capital all share original DNA. Early venture capital endeavours in the 1940s were motivated by ‘investing in and inventing solutions that would help soldiers perform better in battle’ (Vardan et al., 2020). With an early concentration of technology firms in Palo Alto emerging in the 1950s, venture capital increasingly invested in this region during this time, ‘owed much to the intersection of […] direct and indirect benefits from universities, government military expenditure as a boost to high-tech, and a special legal, cultural, and physical climate’ (Nicholas, 2019: 184). Similarly, the digital landscape itself, as we know it today, has its roots in military visions and requisitions. Norbert Wiener’s innovations in communications theory were harnessed for military missile technology in the 1950s, the grandfathers of AI almost all worked on mid-century military projects, and, of course, the Internet itself began as a military project, then named ARPANET, fostered by Pentagon requirements. And for much of Silicon Valley’s early history, until the 1990s, the region’s biggest single employer was a prominent weapons company: Lockheed Missiles and Space, today known as Lockheed Martin (Gonzalez, 2024: 4). During the boom in commercial digital technologies in the 1990s and early 2000s, Silicon Valley and VCs turned their backs on defence projects and capitalised on outsized profits from the civilian use of Silicon Valley products. During this period, the defence market was considered mature and consolidated, dominated by a handful of key industry players, the so-called ‘primes’, who held a firm grip on the defence market and associated procurement processes. 

This made VC investment in the defence sector unattractive for a good three decades, not least because the gains that could be made in a government environment were no match for the extraordinary gains VCs were able to make in the commercial realm. Moreover, investing in matters of war and conflict was, for many investors, too high of a moral risk and associated with too steep of a reputational cost, with investors ‘fearful of falling foul of environmental, social, and governance rules’ (Bradshaw and Pfeifer, 2024). These animosities began to fade in the mid-2010s through the confluence of a number of likely factors: the extraordinary yields from the first cycle of technology investments in the early 2000s needed new investment opportunities, the inclusion of more and more software products for defence infrastructures normalised the dual-useFootnote 2 aspect of emerging technologies and with advances made in software and hardware innovation, Silicon Valley companies had set their eyes on ‘overturning established industry structures’ (Andreessen, 2011), and the launch of a number of innovation-focused defence programmes in the United States facilitated the forging of much closer ties between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley specifically and between defence and the world of venture capital more broadly. Emboldened by the astounding financial possibilities of software-for-defence products, the VC sector has now once more rekindled its fraternity with the defence sector, but with an inverted hierarchy. It is not the government organisations that dictate the pace and requisitions for innovation, but rather, it is the technology industry and its associated financiers that seek to ‘reengineer […] the Pentagon’s DNA for a new era’ (Smith and Ulevich, 2023). 

In recent years, the market opportunities for VC funding in this sector have accelerated, reflected in what Deputy Defence Secretary Kathleen Hicks called a ‘surge in US defence tech focused startups, scale-ups and private and venture capital’ with ‘some 2,000 deals, investing 100 billion [US] dollars since 2021’ (Hicks, 2024). From 2019 to 2022, VC money injected into military technology startups in the United States alone more than doubled (Kinder, 2023), and since 2021, the defence technology startup sector has been injected with nearly US$130 billion (MacColl, 2024). Significant actors in the VC defence space include government-affiliated organisations, like the Defence Innovation Experimental Unit (DIUx, now DIU), but also key players from the technology industry with extraordinary financial power who are hedging their bets in the defence sector – among them Eric Schmidt (formerly Google), Peter Thiel (PayPal and Palantir), and Marc Andreessen (Netscape), and their respective VC firms. There are, of course, many others. The DIU, launched in 2015 by then-Defence Secretary Ash Carter with the aim to provide funding for small military startups (Gonzalez,  2024: 3) played a crucial role in changing the defence landscape to focus much more on software products. However, it is the private VC actors who have now firmly set their eyes on shifting the defence finance ecology in their interest and who are accelerating the advancements VC financing makes in the defence space, prompting some of the defence primes to start up their own VC funds, such as Lockheed Martin Ventures and RTX Ventures (Gonzalez, 2024: 18). 

VC adheres to a different logic than other financial instruments in the defence sector. The aim for VC firms is to make extraordinary returns for investors within a 10-year window, by betting on a high-risk, high-reward strategy and they do so by investing in companies that do not yet have an established market position but have high-growth potential. VC funders often take a hands-on approach to their investees, and once VCs have identified potentially high-growth startups, they must ‘back them with every resource’ to achieve the desired success (Thiel and Masters,  2014: 86). The primary product of the defence VC strategy is not a defence technology as such, but financial returns achieved through growth (Howard,  2024: 91). In short, the VC wager is one in which existing wealth is to be multiplied through the anticipation of significant growth, invigorated by a shallow Schumpeterianism – destruction with the anticipation of creating capital gains through growth at all costs (Kenney and Zysman, 2019: 43). Anticipation is the operative term here. VC aims are firmly rooted in future-oriented expectations of possibility, which they help force into being. 

This affects the way VC firms manifest their interests in relation to both the startups and the markets. It incentivises startups to adopt a winner-takes-all mentality, which is often accompanied by overpromising and embracing risk, mistakes, and errors in the pursuit of scaling up rapidly. Moreover, in order to realise VC interests, a targeted market must align with their timelines and propositions or else be made to align if it is not already so aligned. In other words, the old ways of defence must be disrupted in order to accommodate new players with more lofty ambitions. The disruption of any market does, however, come at a cost to many of its multiple stakeholders. 

Since VCs have re-discovered the defence sector, discourses and practices about defence acquisition, defence regulation, the global threat landscape, and relevant defence technologies for future wars have begun to change. Increasingly, prominent visions for war and security come to mirror the logic and priorities of Silicon Valley industries and its products, and the defence VC sector is exerting significant influence to help shape defence in the image of Silicon Valley itself. By all accounts, this seems to bear fruit – in an event organised by Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent VC company investing in AI-enabled weapon systems, Deputy Defense Secretary Hicks conjures up one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic mottos in closing her American Dynamism keynote: ‘yes, moving fast and breaking things is necessary to win wars’ (Hicks, 2024) – the only thing that must never be broken is the law and the US Constitution. 

In this article, I argue that the logic of VC funding and its specific financial aims exerts not only a significant power in shaping the companies and the products supported through VC funding but that this logic needs a market that accommodates the fundamental parameters of VC profit making and that this move bears significant challenges for a sector that deals with matters of life and death. VC interests enact their priorities through a mix of lobbying, legislative tools, and mythmaking, which in turn moulds the defence sector to its needs. This mandate for structural and cultural change has consequences. In the context of defence, the cost of disruption is born not only by the businesses that traditionally dominate a market but by those communities and socio-political stakeholders that are affected by the military and its practices, including those caught in the crosshairs of new, VC-backed technologies. In short, I argue that the influx of VC money in the defence sector shapes both military processes and military visions and these changes, while bearing financial fruit for investors, have potentially significant impacts on matters of peace and security. There is a substantial, and growing, literature on the relationship between VC logics and digitally shaped economies and the ensuing business practices (see, e.g. Langley and Leyshon, 2017; Cooiman, 2024; Kampmann, 2024; Howard, 2024; Kenney and Zysman, 2019, among others), but, with a few exceptions (such as Gonzalez, 2024; Marshall, 2023; Brenes and Hartung,  2024), this dynamic remains underexplored in its effects on the military domain. This is what I turn my attention to here.

Critique

'Free the Market: How We Can Save Capitalism from the Capitalists' by Mark A Lemley in (2024) 76(1) Hastings Law Journal comments 

The free market works because no one person or company is making the decisions. In a competitive market, businesspeople make the wrong decisions all the time, just as central planners do. But the consequences of those decisions don’t infect the market as a whole. Businesses that guess wrong lose money or go out of business. But as long as there is a competitor out there who guesses right, the market provides people what they want. 

But it turns out that the very last thing capitalists want is a free market. Capitalism may thrive under conditions of robust market competition, but most capitalists don’t. They would much rather operate in an environment free from government restraint but also free from the discipline of a truly competitive market. 

Unfortunately, we have obliged them. At every turn, we have allowed the dominant forces in a market to erect barriers to protect themselves from being dislodged and to maximize their own profits at the expense of everyone around them. The result has been that while we have a capitalist economy, we no longer have a free market. Nearly every market sector is less competitive today than it was fifty years ago. We have centralized control over important sectors of the economy in a handful of companies. And we have given them the tools to use that control to prevent new competition, to make it hard for consumers to take advantage of what competition there is, to drive down wages, and to extract as much short-term profit as possible rather than invest in long-term productivity. Late-stage capitalism isn’t the free market run amok. It is the capture of markets by actors who have a vested interest in making sure there is no free market. And the consequences have been dire, not only for consumers, but for inequality and political stability in the U.S. and throughout the world. 

The good news is that we have the tools to reverse that process and to free the market—and many of them are legal tools. These are big problems; much bigger than the law. But many of these problems are traceable to our failure over the past forty years to enforce legal rules that regulate markets. Enforcing the antitrust laws we already have will make a good start at undoing this harm. There are also a number of other laws we can pass that can help free the market, restricting mergers, opening markets, protecting consumers from corporate efforts to block consumer access to information, and ensuring a free market for employees. And one agency—the Federal Trade Commission—has both the authority and the motivation to open markets to competition. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which capitalists have prevented market competition and how we can reverse those changes.