IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2019 - 95

AI: A Key Enabler of Sustainable
Development Goals, Part 1
By Alaa Khamis, Howard Li, Edson Prestes, and Tamas Haidegger

W

e are witnessing a paradigm
shift regarding how people
purchase, access, consume,
and utilize products and
services as well as how companies operate,
grow, and deal with challenges in a
world that is continuously changing.
This transformation is unpredictable
thanks to fast-growing technological
innovations. One of the cornerstones
is artificial intelligence (AI). AI is prob-
ably the most rapidly expanding field
of technology, due to the strong and
increasingly diversified commercial
revenue stream it has generated. The
anticipated benefits and risks of the per-
vasive use of AI have encouraged politi-
cians, economists, and policy makers to
pay more attention to the results. Given
the fact that AI's internal decision-
making process is nontransparent, some
experts consider it to be a significant
existential risk to humanity, while other
scholars argue for maximizing the
technology's exploitation.
The next wave of strong/general AI
and superintelligence will open the doors
to creating machines that move flawlessly
and behave cognitively-indeed, super-
humanly-at both individual and group
levels in unstructured, dynamic, and par-
tially observable environments. This
may represent a significant threat to
humanity if it is not regulated and intelli-
gently directed toward beneficial out-
comes. Part 1 of this article sheds light
on the role of AI as an enabler for
achieving the sustainable development
goals (SDGs) adopted by United Na-
tions (UN) member states. (The role of
AI as an enabler for reaching the UN's
SDGs is highlighted in Figure 1.)
Part 2, to be published in an upcom-
ing issue, will deal with the capabilities
that intelligent robots provide.

What Is Intelligence?
Human intelligence has been a subject of
reasoning for the brightest minds in his-
tory. The great philosopher Socrates
(ca. 470-399 BCE) said, allegedly, "I
know that I am intelligent because I
know that I know nothing." Albert Ein-
stein (1879-1955) saw imagination as
the true sign of intelligence, not knowl-
edge. Stephen W. Hawking (1942-
2018) considered intelligence to be the
ability to adapt to change. Many theo-
ries have been devised to explain bio-
logical intelligence, such as the general
intelligence posited by Charles Spear-
man (1863-1945), the theory of multi-
ple intelligences by Howard Earl
Gardner (1943-present), and the triar-
chic theory of intelligence by Robert

Sternberg (1949-present). According to
Spearman's theory, intelligence is defined
as the ability to obtain and use knowl-
edge in a productive way. It involves the
aptitude to create an effective product
or offer a service that is valued in a cul-
ture, a set of skills that makes it possible
for a person to solve problems in life,
and the potential for finding or creating
solutions to problems, all of which
involves gathering new knowledge.
The triarchic theory of intelligence
[1] probably is the most comprehen-
sive. It describes human intelligence
as a mental activity directed toward
purposive adaptation, selection, and
shaping of real-world environments
relevant to one's life. This means that
intelligence signifies how well an

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2019.2928738
Date of publication: 5 September 2019

Figure 1. AI and the UN's SDGs.

SEPTEMBER 2019

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2019

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