(MILA/Building 21 BLUE Fellowship Showcase) Future Building - Imagining Ethical AI Alignment Applied to Agricultural Autonomy

The Showcase

Part 1 Posters Series: Context on the Perspectices of AI Alignment

These posters provide an initial analysis and perspective on the discourse of AI alignment. It is an assessment used to contextualize how emerging technologies such as AI systems are conceptually aligned with “human values” for ethical development. This assessment is the basis for a larger perspective on developing ethical technological systems within the domain of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) and a deployment focus on localized food production for food scarcity.

Poster 1 showcases a broader context of future building through concepts such as, technological sublime and sociotechnical imaginaries (Industrial Utopia, Cyberpunk, and Solarpunk) and looks at common themes found within works of fiction. It is heavily based in the works of Tricase et al. (2025), Serbanescu et al. (2025), and Nye(1996).

Poster 2 provides a look into how social failures are contextualized in current systems through the AI alignment problem, its formulation through value systems as policies and the operationalization of those policies into AI systems. It is based on various academic literature in the field of AI alignment, as well as personal attendence of AI policy conferences, and individual discussion had with technical developers of AI systems in industry that embed institutional policy enforcement into their AI systems.

Poster 3 is a critique on the contemporary discourse of the AI alignment problem and the enforcement structures of policies. These critiques are based on the examination of current social failurs present in AI systems through the lens of controversies found in recent news.

Part 2 Presentation: Proposal towards Future Building Imagining Ethical AI Alignment Applied to Agricultural Autonomy

References

Serbanescu, A., & Schuller, K. (2025). Shifting AI Narrative. From Dystopian to Solarpunk Futures in Design Education.

Tricase, L., & Mattoni, A. Contesting AI Futures: Social Movements and the Solarpunk AI Imaginary.

Nye, D. E. (1996). American technological sublime. mit Press.

Oldenburg, N., & Papyshev, G. (2025, October). The Stories We Govern By: AI, Risk, and the Power of Imaginaries. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 1939-1950).

Reina-Rozo, J. D. (2021). Art, energy and technology: the Solarpunk movement. International Journal of engineering, social justice, and peace, 8(1), 47-60.

Gillam, W. J. (2023). A solarpunk manifesto: Turning imaginary into reality. Philosophies, 8(4), 73.

Kohtala, C. (2024). Solarpunk as a maker imaginary. In FAB24, Puebla, Mexico, 3-9 August 2024.

Gabriel, I., & Ghazavi, V. (2022). The challenge of value alignment. The Oxford handbook of digital ethics, 336-355.

Hou, B. L., & Green, B. P. (2023). Foundational Moral Values for AI Alignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.17017.

Varshney, K. R. (2024, October). Decolonial AI Alignment: Openness, Visesa-Dharma, and Including Excluded Knowledges. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (Vol. 7, pp. 1467-1481).

Rismani, S., & Moon, A. (2021, October). How do ai systems fail socially?: an engineering risk analysis approach. In 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science and Technology (ETHICS) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.

Moon, A., Rismani, S., & Van der Loos, H. M. (2021). Ethics of corporeal, co-present robots as agents of influence: a review. Current Robotics Reports, 2(2), 223-229.

Palla, K., García, J. L. R., Hauff, C., Fabbri, F., Damianou, A., Lindström, H., … & Lalmas, M. (2025, June). Policy-as-prompt: Rethinking content moderation in the age of large language models. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 840-854).