Artificial Intelligence and Poverty Alleviation: A Review

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term attracting significant attention from both research as well as practice. AI is a constantly evolving frontier of emerging computing capabilities and technologies including but not limited to autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, robots, and virtual agents. The impact of AI has been examined in various business and non-business contexts, including the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations. However, due to the mixed findings of various studies, the exact nature of AI’s impact on specific SDGs is not clear. We combine quantitative and qualitative reviews of the extant academic literature to examine the impact of AI on an important SDG – alleviation of poverty. This study has multiple potential contributions – we identify the key trends in the extant research in this domain and also open up the black box of intermediate mechanisms through which AI affects poverty alleviation.