IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 32

AI for a Fair, Just, and Equitable World

justice (nondiscrimination, lack of bias, solidarity,
and sharing of the benefits), and explicability (transparency, intelligibility, accountability of actions, and
decision processes).
On a philosophical level, the potential contribution of A/IS to " human flourishing " is often mentioned.
Spiritual traditions, ethical schools, and psychologists
agree that self-realization and personal happiness cannot be decoupled from the common good, and the
common good is not possible without justice, so that
A/IS for human flourishing must be fundamentally
at the service of justice. Since a wide view of ethics
focuses on potentialities, not only on risk mitigation,
from such a view arises the ethical imperative to harness AI technologies to the benefit of humanity to
improve quality-of-life for all rather than contributing
to perpetuating systemic injustices. Apel [10] argues
that globalization obligates a universal-ethics response
to planetary challenges, in which technology can play
a crucial role. However, the ethical debate weighing
up the risks and dangers inherent to A/IS against their
potential to contribute to the creation of an equitable
and prosperous world is taking place mostly in high-income countries (HICs) so that much of it is of little relevance to the more than 700 million people living in
extreme poverty. Reciprocally, ethical questions that
greatly affect marginalized populations are not treated
with the importance they deserve in this debate.
Universal-ethics considerations gave rise to the
United Nations (UN) Agenda for Sustainable Development, which commits all member states to make
concerted efforts toward building an inclusive, sustainable, prosperous, and resilient future for people and the planet, reified in the set of sustainable
development goals (SDGs) to be reached by 2030.
Eradicating poverty is a central objective of the
SDGs and though the emphasis is on lower- and
middle-income countries (LMICs), they also target
the growing pockets of underdevelopment in HICs.
There is a growing interest in the role that A/IS can
play in achieving these objectives on the part of
international organizations, such as UN Global Pulse
(UNGP) [11], United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) [12], the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Global
Innovation Centre [13], the World Wide Web Foundation [14], and even the World Economic Forum
[15]. Since 2017, The International Telecommunications Union has held the annual " AI for Good Global
Summit " [16], which aims to accelerate progress

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toward the SDGs by connecting " problem owners "
with AI innovators and promoting inclusive, trusted,
and safe development of A/IS and equitable access
to their benefits.
Realizing the potential A/IS holds of contributing
to the achievement of the SDGs, in particular, those
more related to equity, while avoiding the many pitfalls involved, requires research of a practical nature
that goes beyond cataloging risks and potentialities.
In this article, we argue that it requires the establishing or strengthening of a research field which we
denominate " AI for equity " (AI4Eq) and its promotion not only among A/IS professionals and researchers but also among the general public. AI4Eq would
need to explore in-depth the risks of A/IS that disproportionally affects marginalized communities since
such risks are often neglected.
This article can be viewed as a call for action to
participate and promote the AI4Eq field, in part as a
counterweight to the heavily plugged corporate sector
view on AI ethics, which is often little more than " ethicswash " (and apparent interest in the SDGs is often
little more than bluewash) for a program in which the
effect of AI/S development and deployment will most
likely be to increase inequality [17], [18].
R&D in AI4Eq requires a coordinated, multidisciplinary effort of application-driven AI researchers,
applied ethicists, IT-law professionals, and experts
in technological innovation for development. It will
also require collaboration with both the public and
the private sector, international institutions, third
sector organizations, and, very importantly, citizen
participation.

Potential benefit/risk of harm
Already in [19], pioneering expert system (ES)
applications were shown to have great promise in
LMICs for improving productivity, supporting policymaking and capacity building, and providing universal access to basic services. In [20], we illustrate the
role of A/IS in advancing the SDGs in three crucial
sectors: agriculture, water resource management
(WRM), and health. Vinuesa et al. [21] present the
general panorama regarding the use of A/IS in sectors that are crucial for the SDGs. As the sectors mentioned above, this includes the role of A/IS in the
provision of energy, in particular renewable energy,
in intelligent cities that use resources efficiently and
in autonomous electric vehicles. However, generally
speaking, judging from the academic literature, the

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