State of AI Ethics Report

RAW has a new publication in the 7th Volume of the State of AI Ethics Report, published by the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. We're delighted to be part of this conversation! Special thanks to co-author and co-researcher Eliot Tretter for his work on this and on the broader project. Access the PDF here.

AI in Oil and Gas: The Case of Alberta

At first blush, AI and petroleum extraction might appear to be on opposite ends of the human experience: the former is based on data harvesting and computation, and the latter's natural source material exists on a geological timescale predating humans entirely. However, there is growing overlap between the two: AI is becoming increasingly suffused in the work of petroleum extraction. It can be found in autonomous vehicles, drones and robotics, data analytics, automation, and so on. This has important ramifications for labour justice that are often overlooked in scholarly and popular conversations about AI's labour impacts.

Our research focuses on how AI shifts the geographies of petroleum extractive labour, and we look specifically at the case of Alberta, the dominant oil and gas producer in Canada. Increasing automation allows greater centralization of labour in places far from the oilpatch. In Alberta, this often means that work being done in the oil sands region of Wood Buffalo and Fort McMurray being relocated to Calgary, 450 miles away, or Edmonton, 250 miles away. In these cities, workers are able to monitor incoming data streams from sensors, control drones and robotics doing inspections, and monitor autonomous trucks and pumpjacks. The consequence of this is that fewer people need to commute to the oil sands region. A senior executive for Imperial Oil recently said, "With our fully automated fleet, we’re improving safety by removing the worker from the hazard while offering efficiencies and work execution"; and later, "We estimate that [Imperial's 'four-legged robot' Spot] can conduct almost 70% of some operator rounds, allowing us to reallocate operator and maintenance resources to higher value work", presumably in these cities.

Fewer workers are traveling to Wood Buffalo and Fort McMurray, and this may be causing a "de-fielding" of the oilpatch. From 2018 to 2024, airport traffic to the main airport decreased by 40.6%, and concurrently, overall employment in Wood Buffalo fell 11.3%. Over this same time period, employment in Calgary in mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction remained steady at around 6.5%, while oil and gas production rates have consistently increased to reach record highs in 2024.

What does any of this have to do with labour justice? We are observing two important effects of these geographic shifts. The first is that on-site work may tend to fall to precarious, short-term, often freelance contracts, mediated by digital platforms like RigUp and Rigzone. Many social scientists have documented the ways that such precaritization reduces labour's ability to organize and collectively bargain for protections and fair wages. It also removes these workers from a firm's formal employment roster, allowing the firm to forego offering certain benefits such as private health insurance, a retirement package, or disability insurance.

The second effect is that, with the reduced number of travelers to the oil sands, the support service industry would experience declines in their client base. With fewer clients to service, economic activity is hurt. As reflected in Government of Canada statistics showing that in 2024 there were "increases in employment in every economic region in Alberta, except for Wood Buffalo-Cold Lake," which declined by about 1.7% of the entire regional labour base. An important note is that these trends will likely disproportionately impact First Nations communities, as they comprise a large percentage of the service industry in the region. Indigenous-owned businesses and communities are likely to suffer the worst of the impacts of these shifting geographies of work.

While it is not the objective of this chapter, our research suggests that these two effects should further be more central in discussions about a just transition to post-carbon economies, where AI similarly plays an outsized role. Together, the two effects we observe bear striking similarity to similar geographic industrial shifts in the US, such as the decline of coal production in the Appalachia region.

One could suggest that this isn't "AI's fault." We would agree, if what is meant is that the technology itself didn't instigate the industrial shifts. However, technology is never neutral, as it is embedded within institutional, political, and social contexts. In the Alberta case, such contexts include pressures to confront global climate change, global decarbonization, and a foreshadowed slowdown of carbon-based energy consumption. In other words, what we see here is a socio-technical transformation, where one cannot separate the technology from society, which has strong implications for the social geographies of job losses. In this sense, whether it is "AI's fault" is beside the actual point that AI is advancing problematic labour relations in concert with software engineers, Chief Technology Officers, policymakers, corporate leaders, and venture capitalists.