IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 66

[60], [61], [71]. Scientific research exists and can be further developed to identify ways of moving from generally
agreed values - starting, perhaps, with those already
enshrined in international treaties under the United
Nations, including Agenda 2030 - to embedding them
into systems such that they work with humans and strive
to maximize the common good. "Human-Centered AI"
design strives to collaborate with humans, enhancing
human capabilities, and empowering humans to better
achieve their goals. Its goals are enhancement, empowerment, and transparency, to promote human well-being [3].

Hoping for People to Mobilize
Scholars place great hopes on "the people" to mobilize
and bend trends in directions of sustainability but are
vague about how this might happen. In an age of rising
authoritarianism, it is especially risky to assume that societies automatically will muster the needed understanding
and collective power and resolve to mobilize and ensure
that the Sustainable Development Goals are reached without transgressing planetary boundaries and within the
available, narrowing window of time to do so. Obstacles
to rational decision making and, more fundamentally, to
being aware of reality, are mounting rather than diminishing, and AI bears significant responsibility for that.
Media and AI could be harnessed to support calledfor - and sorely needed - norm- and science-based
understanding and multi-level, broad-based dialogue
about the future we want, and to identify how to work
towards building it. This would require overcoming common, countervailing assumptions about how communications systems should be managed, and associated,
common but erroneous understandings - especially
strong in the United States - that despotism is best
avoided through fragmented, largely privatized media
systems, and dangerous assumptions that technical
knowledge and supposedly neutral policy making can
and should substitute for normative, political, collective
decision making [10].
Social engineering is already happening. It is an inescapable fact. What matters is who is in control and their
guiding norms, ethics, and principles. Current information environments are endangering the future of humans
and nature; we are far from being and becoming "learning societies" [69]. Since intention and normativity are
built (if often unwittingly) into the very core of AI, AI
design needs to be carefully governed and to become an
integral, deliberate and explicit element in "transformative" policy frameworks for achievement of Agenda 2030
and respect for planetary boundaries. Sustainability
goals within planetary boundaries cannot be realized
unless there is increased recognition that mass reality is
already shaped by power, and how. Only rethinking and
redesign of the principles and technologies that generate

66

information contexts within which public decisions are
made can positively engender the future we will get.

Author Information
The author is with the Department of Social Sciences,
Wageningen University and Research (WUR), Hollandseweg 1, Wageningen, GE 6706 KN, The Netherlands;
and with the Center for Earth System Science (CCST),
INPE, Av. dos Astronautas, 1758, São José dos Campos,
SP 12227-010, Brazil. Email: myannal@gmail.com.

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