Will Artificial Intelligence Help or Hinder Progress on the SDGs?

Synthetic data are one of many tools that can drive progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, but environmental and ethical concerns remain.

There is a lot of interest from inside the United Nations around how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to speed up progress towards its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), says computer scientist Serge Stinckwich.

As head of research at the United Nations University Institute in Macau (UNU Macau), which was established by the UN in 1992 to do research and training on the use of digital technologies in addressing global issues, Stinckwich is interested in how AI can help countries to hit their SDG targets by the 2030 deadline.

Any gains made using AI will come with costs, however. A notoriously power-hungry resource that is vulnerable to bias and inequitable access, AI presents its own challenges.

Stinckwich spoke to Nature Index about how institutions can use AI tools responsibly to power their SDG-related research.

What is one example of how AI can be used to speed up progress towards the SDGs?

The popularity of large language models (LLMs) has caused a rapid escalation in the amount of data being used to train AI systems. There’s now a scarcity of machine-readable, diverse data on the Internet for training AI algorithms. Synthetic data, which are generated using algorithms and simulations that mimic real-world scenarios, provide a way to train AI models on more data than would usually be possible.

Synthetic data can help to rebalance biased data sets — for example, in a data set skewed towards one gender, synthetic data can be added to balance representation. They can also help to address the problem of scarcity or missing data. This can be particularly useful in medical research, in which people’s health data and personal information can be hard to obtain because of privacy issues.