ISTOCK/H ATCHA Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability Should AI be Designed to Save Us from Ourselves? Reconciling Environmental Sustainability with Human Needs The environment is being destroyed at alarming rates, undermining prospects of reconciling human wellbeing and development and respect for planetary boundaries [1]. Even a thirty percent increase in global action towards goals already en shrined in international agreements on environment, trade and development would not achieve widely shared sustainability goals without transgressing planetary boundaries [1]. In short, existing institutions are not steering us safely towards environmental sustainability and the common good. The challenge of fostering positive social and environmental policy based on scientific recommendations is growing steeper, not weaker, in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and social media. Political uses of AI in the form of data flows, machine learning, and large-scale data analytics and algorithms are threatening to make societies more rather than less opaque, creating a "black box Myanna Lahsen Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2020.2991502 Date of current version: 18 June 2020 60 0278-0097/20©2020IEEE IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE ∕ JUNE 2020