The foresight process brought together a diverse group of professionals, practitioners and researchers in five workshops and one workshop open to the public. Expertise included environmental consultants, engineers, programmers, UX and service designers, city officials, political scientists and change management professionals. Together we took a deep dive into not just the trends and crossovers in sustainability and AI but into imagined and reframed futures. We envisioned what might be possible as the green transition converges with AI’s increasing capabilities, transporting ourselves beyond current paradigms to safer, more just operating spaces for humanity and the planet. And also to futures where questions of ethics, equality and equity problematised the idea of AI as our saviour. The workshops created a space where we could ask, what if? They offered a chance to dream, dispute and hope.

This book brings together the insights, thoughts, questions and imaginings that evolved during the workshops. It is meant as a prompt for organisations, businesses and individuals to consider how AI could help us transition to a more sustainable world and what this AI-enabled world could look like. It is not intended as a comprehensive AI guide, tool or workbook, nor does it claim to have all the answers or be a research report. Instead, by using it as a jumping-off point, we hope you can create some visions and solutions of your own towards a sustainable future where you dare to dream.

The following book parts are loosely grouped around the following themes:

1. Nowhere to Hide - Demanding Transparency and Accountability,
2. Reconnection and Recognition - Putting Nature Back at the Centre,
3. Who decides? - Facilitating Decision-making and Governance,
4. Human and Machine - Enhancing Human Capabilities and Creativity.

Each part weaves together the futures imagined during the workshops with some (but by no means all) of the most prominent and thought-provoking global signals and trends currently driving sustainability, AI and the crossover between the two. The signals  ¹ and trends  ²   became our starting point and helped us to ask, where are we heading, what do we need to do to steer ourselves in the right direction and what else might change? The book parts also include essay contributions from several of the workshop participants, and others, on topics related to their work, research and expertise, as well as on questions that emerged and subjects triggered by the futures we explored together.

The futures we imagined fall within the following ways of thinking:

Possible futures Where causal connections are considered in complex scenarios. Starting with current trends and signals and imagining what might shift in the near future, i.e. the next decade and then looking beyond at how these developments might evolve and what they might lead to by the 2050s. These futures cover future developments ranging from probable and plausible to those within the realm of possibility. They are imagined with the humility needed for such an exercise, as the future remains open and essentially unpredictable.

Desirable futures Imagining how, in 20 years, an existing system, societal construct or situation could change for the better ³ , what would be needed to make that possible and who would benefit.

Alternative futures By focusing on and challenging the assumptions (i.e. statements that can't be proven now but might be proven later) at play in the previous two futures, can we expand our thinking and reframe what else might be possible in 20 years and consider what questions arise from reframing the future giving rise to new possibilities in the present.

Notes on the future, sustainability and AI

The futures in this book are imagined using a ‘futuring’ process based partly on the Futures Literacy method heralded by UNESCO. They are guided by a set of principles, including acknowledging that we can’t predict the future, that there is no one future but multiple possible futures, that no one person is an authority on the future and that our own and shared biases and assumptions influence us, the way we imagine the future and what we consider possible in the present.

Rarely has a word been so overused, decontextualised and misunderstood as ‘sustainability’. It has become a catch-all for doing good, commandeered by the advertising industry and business to the extent that its meaning has become diluted and distrusted.

In the context of this book, we use the term sustainability as defined by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” We also approach the concept considering all three of its pillars; environmental, social and economic.

When we talk about artificial intelligence in this book, we are not talking about a fixed concept that has one universally understood definition but an ever-evolving field. While new technology might be classified as AI in its infancy, as users become accustomed to its functions and as newer technologies emerge, that same technology might be declassified, leading to a more sophisticated definition of AI. We also use AI as the umbrella term that it is, encompassing other domains, including machine learning and deep learning. Perhaps the most fascinating and misunderstood dimensions of AI exist in its naming, with some researchers pointing to the fact that it is neither artificial (it is real) nor intelligent (rather, it uses human intelligence). The latter part of the name is also the part that stimulates the most fear—a thing of dystopian fiction that could act independently and against humans.