Artificial intelligence and sustainable development during the pandemic: An overview of the scientific debates

Abstract

The current work aims to analyze the main themes related to artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainable development during the pandemic period. This study provides an overview of the specialized literature related to AI and sustainability from the beginning of the pandemic through 2023. The present paper analyses scientific literature emphasizing both artificial intelligence's positive and negative impacts on sustainable development objectives (SDGs). To conduct the research, we employed bibliometric analysis and text-mining techniques to identify the major themes in the literature indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Firstly, we used descriptive measures to identify the authors' impact, the article production by country, the main keywords used, and other descriptive data. We further used data reduction methods based on co-word analysis (such as multiple correspondence analysis) on authors' keywords to show patterns in the themes explored in the literature. Bibliometric analysis was supplemented by text mining using Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and structural topic modeling on abstracts to provide a comprehensive view of scientific debates on AI and sustainable development. Our research has identified various themes in the literature related to AI and sustainable development. These themes include social sustainability, health-related issues, AI technologies for energy efficiency, sustainability in industry and innovation, IoT technologies for smart and sustainable cities, urban planning, technologies for education and knowledge production, and the impact of technologies on SDGs. We also found that there is a significant positivity bias in the literature when discussing the impact of AI on sustainable development. Despite acknowledging certain risks, the literature tends to focus on the potential benefits of AI across various sectors. In addition, the analysis shows a growing emphasis on energy efficiency, which is facilitated by the use of AI technologies. Our study contributes to a better understanding of current scholarly discussion trends and emerging scientific avenues regarding AI and sustainable development. It also highlights the areas where research is needed and the implications for practitioners and policymakers.