Part of the United Nation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the Division Sustainable Development Goals (DSDG) was tasked with addressing 17 sustainable goals, enumerated on the DSDG website. The target concerns of these goals, as cited in the DSDG’s mission statement, include “water, energy, climate, oceans, urbanization, transport, science and technology.” Breakthrough: The Promise of Frontier Technologies for Sustainable Development, edited by Homi Kharas, John McArthur, and Izumi Ohno, addresses a broad range of areas related to the 17 goals—for example, public health, green energy, small stakeholders in agriculture, emergency management, smart cities, and digital technologies to create new systems of innovation sharing—and relevant in terms of artificial intelligence (AI). Rolf Baltzersen’s Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Collective Intelligence: Patterns in Problem Solving and Innovation emphasizes AI but explores similar topics of group problem-solving utilizing mobile technologies, social media communication, and so on. As the title suggests, Tara Dawson Mcguinness and Hana Schank’s Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology also focuses on technology, addressing government reorganization to better incentivize innovation.
At this writing, artificial intelligence is gaining a great deal of attention and a number of resources are of particular value in terms of the history of AI. Recent among these is On Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers, in which Mike Sharples and Rafael Pérez y Pérez describe the history of writing machines, beginning in the mid-19th century with the Eureka machine (which was created to generate Latin verse) and continuing to late-20th-century computer model story generators such as MEXICA and MINSTREL and to AI developments of the present century. All-in on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence, by Thomas Davenport and Nitin Mittal, offers practical information about AI use and initiatives, exploring how AI has already been implemented at well-known companies such as Google, Wal-Mart, and CapitalOne. Davenport joins forces with Stephen Miller in Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration, examining AI augmentation (partial automation) through 29 interview-based case studies of varied sectors and workplaces—for example, AI-assisted writing, agriculture, banking and e-commerce, fast food, financial transaction processing and verification, and cyber security. In Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership when Algorithms and Networks Run the World, Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani also use industry case studies and argue for further scaling of digital systems architecture via AI to further American industrial competitiveness in the global network. And in Tech Wars: Transforming U.S. Technology Development, Daniel Gerstein argues that the United States is falling behind other countries, China among them, in technology research and development. Gerstein argues for the creation of a government agency to help provide a hybrid system that incorporates some state-centralized R&D to bolster American tech competition in AI and other areas.
Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Collective Intelligence by 
Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers by 
