IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 19

Special Issue Introduction
Artificial Intelligence for a
Fair, Just, and Equitable World
Ángeles Manjarrés

Juan Antonio Rodríguez-Aguilar

Dept. Inteligencia Artificial, ETSI, Universidad
Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED),
28040 Madrid, Spain

Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA),
Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC),
08193 Bellaterra, Spain

Celia Fernández-Aller

Manuel Sierra Castañer

ETSISI, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
(UPM), 28031 Madrid, Spain

Dept. Señales, sistemas y radiocomunicaciones,
ETSIT, Universidad Politécnica, 28040 Madrid,
Spain

Maite López-Sánchez
Dept. Mathematics and Computer Science,
Universitat de Barcelona, 08007 Barcelona, Spain

 From the 1970s onward, we started to dream
of the leisure society in which, thanks to technological progress and consequent increase in productivity, working hours would be minimized and we
would all live in abundance. We all could devote
our time almost exclusively to personal relationships,
contact with nature, sciences, the arts, playful activities, and so on. Today, this utopia seems more unattainable than it did then. Since the 21st century, we
have seen inequalities increasingly accentuated:
of the increase in wealth in the United States
between 2006 and 2018, adjusted for inflation and
population growth, more than 87% went to the richest 10% of the population, and the poorest 50% lost
wealth [1]. Following the crisis of 2008, social inequalities, rights violations, planetary degradation,
and the climate emergency worsened and increased
(see [2]). In 2019, the world's 2153 billionaires had
more wealth than 4.6 billion people [3]. The World
Bank estimates that COVID-19 will push up to 150
million people into extreme poverty [4].

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3056292
Date of current version: 16 March 2021.

March 2021

The future brought to us by technological advances
and, in particular, by the spectacular development of
data science and artificial intelligence (AI) evokes the
dystopian future painted by numerous science-fiction
stories. These stories speak to us through powerful allegories of human existence in the AI era: automated,
dehumanized, and depressed societies, solitude in
the company of machines, predation of the planet,
ecological degradation, totalitarian governments, and
strong inequalities in access to resources and power,
alienation, and exclusion. In this scenario, the elite
people monopolize and use sophisticated intelligent
technology as an instrument of commodification,
repression, exploitation, manipulation, and control of
the dispossessed.
The rise of AI has fueled the debate on the potential contribution of new technologies to the creation
of a prosperous and equitable world, as against the
countless ethical, moral, legal, humanitarian, and
political-social risks, as well as physical and mental
health risks. The ethical questions raised by intelligent systems are currently being addressed by diverse
national and international governmental bodies [5]-
[7], professional bodies [8], academia [9]-[11], and

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021
