By keeping environmental, social and economic sustainability as the new cornerstones for the development of artificial intelligence, AI can provide the fundamental shift in our approach to sustainability needed to save the planet.

Placed inside a circle of live-streaming cameras, a free-moving robotic arm experimented with its movements with avid curiosity--with the semblance of a child who has stumbled upon a hall of mirrors. For three hours, the WidowX 200 Robot Arm tinkered with its movements and studied how various motor commands produced unique movements, deriving insights into its morphology.

Babies actively learn from the environment around them. From the moment they are born, they perceive the world around them through their sense of hearing, smell, sight and touch in unsupervised settings. Research suggests that at just six months of age, infants can comprehend cause and effect relationships--such as understanding that pushing a button on a toy makes it play music.

If data is the new oil, artificial intelligence is the new vessel--and given enough data, AI can take us light years ahead. In a 2020 analysis of businesses leveraging big data by the International Data Group (IDG), it was revealed that small and medium-sized enterprises manage about 50 terabytes of data--a figure that was expected to grow by a margin of 50% over the coming year. This becomes an intriguing figure as small-medium enterprises accounted for 99.9% of the business population in the UK at the start of 2021. One may be led to believe that an estimated 5.5 million SMEs generating large amounts of data would mean that the said data is being actively employed in analytics--however, it may be a faulty presumption. The truth is that infrastructural challenges unique to SMEs oft act as barriers to the effective utilization of data analytics.

Unprecedented heat waves, long droughts, intense floods, and biodiversity losses--the signs are all around us: humanity has locked itself in a long, drawn-out war against climate change. The vital signs of the planet are fluctuating, and only timely climate action involving governments, corporations and individuals can keep our ecosystems from incurring irreversible damage. Fortunately, the tools powered by artificial intelligence can play an instrumental role in preserving our planet and its biodiversity for posterity. Artificial intelligence technology has been a subject of interest in the international discourse regarding sustainable development for years. The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) is a multi-stakeholder forum for world governments and experts leading the effort to devise strategies to bring AI solutions to aid climate action.