17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 8— DECENT WORK AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

“Despite legitimate concerns about automation replacing jobs, AI augmentation and targeted automation with intelligent devices can improve the work environment, increase productivity, and be a significant driver of economic growth.” — AI XPRIZE

Universal Basic Income

Several regions around the world are experimenting with the ways to provide people with income that is separated from work in paid employment in the economy. AI technologies will be used to reducing need for human work on monotonous and dangerous work such as mining, repetitive factory and agricultural work and dangerous industrial work. The pace of this change is faster than it has ever been in history and importantly, the pace is now sub-generational. This means that entire career paths are becoming obsolete or changing beyond recognition well within one worker’s lifetime. Retraining and education are pivotal efforts to move forward but they may not be enough to navigate the next 50 years in a humane way. When these technologies are generating such wealth and efficiency it is unavoidable that this wealth be used to move societies towards a humane and fair new type of economy where the value of a citizen is more than the sum of their wages.

Smart Loans

AI can also help by automating evaluation and critiquing of business loan opportunities, using past successes and failures as training data to judge benefits of new loans. I would think the focus should be on explanation of differences rather than thresholding, how can you move the current approach to a successful one with the least changes?

Each day up until the AI for Good Summit in Geneva on May 15 I’m writing up a thought on how Artificial Intelligence could impact on each UN Sustainable Development Goal. (Go to the first post.)

Mark Crowley has no official affiliation with IBM, XPrize, ITU or the UN. The views and opinions expressed here are entirely his own.