Intelligent Technologies as Proponents of Global Development and Sustainability: An Approach Based on India's Digital Infrastructure

Abstract

The seventeen core goals of the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development demand the need for collective action along social, economic, and environmental fronts. Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, along with cloud/edge computing are notable examples of intelligent technologies and also regarded as facilitators of this agenda. However, the literature that discusses these technologies tends to interpret technology and policy goals in isolation, thus paying inconsistent attention across the seventeen goals and hardly establishing its claims on the realities of any one nation. This paper aims to bridge that gap. It presents a taxonomy of intelligent technologies, aligns them onto a particular segment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) involving infrastructure, human well-being, education, energy and climate, disparities, and sustainable cities, and foundations that connecting on case studies from smart city initiatives and digital public infrastructure projects in India. With the goal to lead future technology-for-development research, the research study builds on this depiction and recommends a four-layer conceptual framework: Infrastructure, Intelligence, Trust, and Impact. It draws its conclusion by inspecting the obstacles that challenge this optimism, such as the digital gap, data privacy, a bias in the algorithm and environmental impact of computation itself, before emphasizing federated and privacy-preserving techniques as a feasible direction for further research. Keywords: artificial intelligence; federated learning; smart cities; Internet of things; Sustainable Development Goals; Digital Public Infrastructure