An increasing number of industries are being impacted by AI development. On a number of variables, including but not limited to global productivity, equality and inclusion, environmental implications, and others, it is projected that AI will have both immediate and long-term repercussions.
There have been reports of both good and negative effects on sustainable development as potential results of AI. Future research must focus on this vital topic since we have found that AI has the potential to impact our ability to achieve the SDGs.
The implications of how artificial intelligence can help or hinder the accomplishment of each of the 17 goals and 169 targets included in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are presented and discussed by a group of Swedish academics. The methodology described at the study’s conclusion can be summed up as an expert elicitation strategy based on consensus and inspired by past studies trying to map the interlinkages between SDGs.
Although there is no agreed-upon definition of artificial intelligence, the researchers included AI in this study to refer to any software system that possesses at least one of the following capabilities:
Perception (e.g., face recognition).
Decision (e.g., medical diagnosis systems).
Prediction (e.g., weather forecast).
automatically extracting knowledge and recognising patterns in data (e.g., the discovery of fake news circles in social media).
Interactive computational difficulty (for instance, natural language (e.g., theory development from premises).
Machine learning is one of the numerous specialised fields that this perspective takes into account.
Impact of AI on society
67 aims (82%) of the social group shown in the graph below could profit from AI-based technology. For instance, AI can help create smart, low-carbon cities that integrate a range of related technologies, like self-driving cars and smart appliances, to help with demand response in the electrical industry.
AI can also aid in the integration of variable renewables by enabling smart networks that partially match energy demand to times when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
Advanced AI research, development, and product creation may require a lot of computing power, which is only available in large data centres. These facilities use a lot of energy and have significant carbon footprints. For instance, cryptocurrency applications like Bitcoin threaten not only SDG 7 but also SDG 13 on climate action by consuming as much electricity globally as the electrical demand of some countries. By 2030, the entire electricity consumption for information and communications technologies (ICTs) may increase from 1% to up to 20% of the global electricity demand, according to some predictions. It is crucial that ICT technologies advance in a sustainable way. Greater energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy in ICTs, and energy-efficient cooling systems for data centres will all help to control the growth of power demand.
