When Will AI Pay for Itself?

The UN's Sustainable Development Goals set 169 targets, most of them for 2030 and some with earlier deadlines that have already passed. Fourteen of the 17 goals show up on this ledger. On four of them - water, energy, waste and climate - AI appears in both columns: the same technology strains the goal in one card and supports it in another, and on water, energy and climate it is the very same target. Every tag on a social goal - poverty, education, work, and peace and justice - is partial: those goals are measured by national surveys and statistics that no AI study measures directly. The tags are this page's own reading of the evidence against each target's UN indicator, not a UN assessment. Where a card's evidence doesn't bear on any indicator, it has no tag, and three goals - gender equality, reduced inequalities and partnerships - have none.