Amsterdam, January 2025 – Everywhere in the world, people are talking about the Digital Transformation. Artificial Intelligence (AI), once a rather obscure and contested area in Computer Science, has become a coffee-table conversation topic. Many countries and blocks (incl. EU) have policies in place to educate digital skills, and they aim (all, without exception!) to be internationally leading.
How this is connected to progress in achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is however unclear. In this session we try to get feet on the ground, investigating how advanced ICT technologies such as AI can be helpful in achieving real-world sustainable results — especially related to sustainable food systems in the world. We show results from many (student) projects with societal impacts in different parts of the Global South. We outline approaches (such as the “Plug-In Principle”) to achieve local community-supported progress concerning the SDGs with ICT. And we take a critical look at the question: how sustainable is AI itself in the light of the SDGs?
The current 17 SDG goals, formulated by the United Nations in 2015 involve digital technologies in almost every goal, as a transversal topic. However, they do not address the grand societal challenges related to technology in the digital society. We therefore propose an 18th sustainable development goal, see tile below:
Organizers and Chairs: Hans Akkermans, Anna Bon & Francis Saa-Dittoh – Download the full conference programme booklet.
Navigating the Anthropocene Conference Session – Thursday 30 January 2025