Good AI for Good: How AI Strategies of the Nordic Countries Address the Sustainable Development Goals
This study highlights a gap in AI policy guidelines for addressing critical global sustainability issues, which is incremental as it builds on existing analyses of responsible AI.
The paper analyzed AI strategy documents from 10 countries or organizations to assess their references to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), finding no significant differences in SDG mentions and noting that Nordic countries did not differ despite their commitment, with key omissions in gender equality, inequality, and environmental impacts.
Developed and used responsibly Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a force for global sustainable development. Given this opportunity, we expect that the many of the existing guidelines and recommendations for trustworthy or responsible AI will provide explicit guidance on how AI can contribute to the achievement of United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This would in particular be the case for the AI strategies of the Nordic countries, at least given their high ranking and overall political focus when it comes to the achievement of the SDGs. In this paper, we present an analysis of existing AI recommendations from 10 different countries or organisations based on topic modelling techniques to identify how much these strategy documents refer to the SDGs. The analysis shows no significant difference on how much these documents refer to SDGs. Moreover, the Nordic countries are not different from the others albeit their long-term commitment to SDGs. More importantly, references to \textit{gender equality} (SDG 5) and \textit{inequality} (SDG 10), as well as references to environmental impact of AI development and use, and in particular the consequences for life on earth, are notably missing from the guidelines.