Artificial Intelligence in the Industry 4.0, and Its Impact on Poverty, Innovation, Infrastructure Development, and the Sustainable Development Goals: Lessons from Emerging Economies?

David Mhlanga

doi:10.3390/su13115788

Abstract

Artificial intelligence in the fourth industrial revolution is beginning to live up to its promises of delivering real value necessitated by the availability of relevant data, computational ability, and algorithms. Therefore, this study sought to investigate the influence of artificial intelligence on the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals with a direct focus on poverty reduction, goal one, industry, innovation, and infrastructure development goal 9, in emerging economies. Using content analysis, the result pointed to the fact that artificial intelligence has a strong influence on the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals particularly on poverty reduction, improvement of the certainty and reliability of infrastructure like transport making economic growth and development possible in emerging economies. The results revealed that Artificial intelligence is making poverty reduction possible through improving the collection of poverty-related data through poverty maps, revolutionizing agriculture education and the finance sector through financial inclusion. The study also discovered that AI is also assisting a lot in education, and the financial sector allowing the previously excluded individuals to be able to participate in the mainstream economy. Therefore, it is important that governments in emerging economies need to invest more in the use of AI and increase the research related to it so that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to innovation, infrastructure development, poverty reduction are attained.

Highlights

Published: 21 May 2021Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is gaining a lot of attention on its potential impact on humanity [1]
The study used secondary research to investigate the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a direct focus on poverty reduction, goal one, industry, innovation, and infrastructure development goal 9, in emerging economies
All these developments are supported by various scholars who investigated the importance of AI in growth and development of economies for instance, Vincent et al [34] argued that the world population is expected to increase to 2 billion in 2050, while the arable area is expected to grow by only 5%

Summary

Introduction

Published: 21 May 2021Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is gaining a lot of attention on its potential impact on humanity [1]. According to Blinov [2] before the coming in of the first industrial revolution championed by Britain, economic activities were limited and as a result, many people were poor and human livelihood was sustained by what people get from the small farms which made life for an average person to be difficult [4]. During this period production was mainly for their consumption, as a result, people were using basic tools which were mainly hand tools for production and production was mainly confined in people’s homes [3,4]. The coming in of the first industrial revolution marked the replacement of animal power to the steam engine which marked the “shift from agrarian livelihood” to industrialization where “special-purpose machinery” was used

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