IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 33

potential of A/IS technologies in areas that are relevant for the SDGs has been insufficiently explored.
Among the technologies most applied in these
areas, again according to the literature, are decision-support systems, geographic information systems (GISs), and control systems, many of the latter
two types of application being data-science-based
(here, we understand the following term inclusion: data science ⊃ data mining ⊃ big data). The
moment in time when symbolic AI techniques were
complemented and largely displaced by machine
learning on big data has coincided with the moment
when the potential usefulness and impact on society of A/IS has increased significantly, and when the
ethical debate surrounding these technologies has
acquired great importance.
Data-science-based GIS have applications in
utility planning, weather and harvest forecasting,
emergency planning, disease monitoring, and identification of areas of poverty. Data-science-based
control systems have applications in precision
agriculture and planning optimization, agricultural
management, biodiversity, naturalizing smart cities
through energy, and traffic control. Data science
also has important applications in health (e.g., development of health policies, generation, and maintenance of health databases and epidemiology) and
e-democracy and social policy (e.g., systems related
to the provision of social protection services and
welfare support). Noteworthy in this context is the
UN Global Pulse [11] initiative intended to foster
discovery, development, and scaled adoption of bigdata innovation for sustainable development and
humanitarian action. Global Pulse has highlighted
important ethical concerns, for example, with both
the collection and use of data during humanitarian emergencies. Kshetri [22] and Ryan et al. [23]
discuss the important role that big data can play
in development, mentioning the fields of health
care, WRM, agriculture, education, environmental
monitoring, biotechnology, conservation of natural
resources, and protection against natural hazards.
Though the contribution of A/IS to productivity is
indisputable, evidence regarding their contribution
to equity and sustainability is much less clear. The
purely economic or technocratic standpoint of only
measuring the contribution to economic growth
can have a deleterious effect on well-being if such
growth comes at a cost of environmental damage
and increased inequality. Measuring the success of

March 2021

A/IS projects in terms of the SDGs would oblige a
more holistic perspective, thereby avoiding losing
sight of the structural causes and roots of the problems being addressed, a criticism that [24] makes of
the currently fashionable focus on " effectiveness " in
international development institutions, this in part
being inspired by the " poor economics " movement
critiqued in [25] and the " effective altruism " movement critiqued in [26]. Vinuesa et al. [21] estimate
that A/IS can contribute positively to 79% of the targets raised by the UN 2030 Agenda, but could also
act as an inhibitor of the remaining 21.
However, the SDGs themselves have been criticized for being incoherent (see [27] and [28]),
though the criticisms could be said to be a response
more to the letter of the SDGs rather than to the spirit
of the 2030 Agenda. Moreover, a certain amount
of incoherence and even conflict between different objectives of the 2030 Agenda can be ascribed
to the fact that they are the result of lengthy negotiations between different international actors on a
complex and comprehensive program. For Spaiser
et al. [27] sustainable development is an oxymoron
if development is equated with economic growth
since endless, unbridled economic growth is incompatible with sustainability. Though the synergy
between objectives and subobjectives of the Agenda
2030 is well studied, Spaiser et al. [27] point to the
existence of negative synergies, where an increase
in some indicators is necessarily associated with a
decrease in others. As is perhaps to be expected,
this phenomenon is particularly marked between
indicators concerned with economic growth and
those related to equality and ecology. Given the
small percentage of economic-growth generated
wealth that trickles down to the most impoverished
classes, to end extreme poverty in the current economic climate would likely require consuming not
only the resources of our entire planet but also those
of several other planet earths! The SDGs appear to
skirt the issue that the current political and economic system and the legislative environment favors
the concentration of wealth and the destruction of
natural resources.
The perceived timidity of the SDGs in this regard
can perhaps also be ascribed to the lengthy negotiations between different actors, since the spirit of the
2030 Agenda, as reflected in documents such as [29],
is expressed as an " inescapable transformation, " that
is, a profound change in systems and structures in

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021

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