We are at a strange junction in global development. Billions are flowing into artificial intelligence, yet the world’s apparent ability to meet its social and environmental targets is shrinking. That divergence is structural. Missing are not resources but the desire to use them with a prosocial vocation. The Sustainable Development Goals that come to an end in 2030 and their equally unfulfilled predecessors must be replaced by Hybrid Development Goals. Why?
A Social Setting That Is Out Of Sync
On one side, investment in AI is skyrocketing, spurred by the promise of exhilarating profit expectations, but also the pressure of business and geopolitical competition. On the other, the Sustainable Development Goals are slipping ever further from reach. Today the so-called developing countries face an annual financing shortfall of roughly USD 4 trillion just to stay on track; the burden of debt and rising borrowing costs significantly contribute to that crisis which annihilates hard-won development gains, particularly in the poorest countries. That unhealthy dynamic is further fueled by ever heavier and more frequent climate change-related disasters (which are now responsible for more than half of the debt increase).
Meanwhile, the infrastructure powering today’s AI boom, massive data centres, energy‑hungry processors, industrial‑scale cooling systems, consumes real, scarce resources. Both financially and in terms of sheer energy. Currently data centres account for about 1.5 % of global electricity consumption. By 2030 around a tenth of global electricity demand growth is set to be driven by data centres.
In economic terms: capital flows, resource constraints, externalities and public goods are misaligned. We’re investing heavily in the frontier of technology and in the process magnifying the very risks – climate, inequality, infrastructure – we claim to address in the name of progress. The longstanding myth of economic growth is luring and misleading.
Disconnected In Plain Sight – Framed In Economic Terms
Markets reward innovation, scale and speed. Less rewarded are the invisible costs: the climate burden, the social debt, the infrastructure deficits. Four interlocking dynamics illustrate how this mismatch plays out in the current arena:
Priority inversion: AI development is framed as essential, while planetary and human resilience are treated as optional. Human suffering is less sexy to fix, than the race toward AI supremacy.
Temporal myopia: Human beings in general and investors in particular tend to chase short‑term returns; the climate and social costs often play out decades later. We focus on tangible benefits, at the expense of long-term interest. Present bias strikes.
Agency decay: As automation and algorithms proliferate, human decision‑makers lose visibility (and control) over how investments map onto development outcomes. Combined with an absent appetite to look at challenges that we don’t want to see, a dangerous dynamic ensues, as the erosion of capacity is combined with the chronic tendency toward wishful thinking.
Value erosion: Solidarity and social capital become side‑constraints, while financial value takes centre‑stage. The “why” of our efforts, as individuals and as a society are relegated to the second plan. Lofty goals are enshrined in mission statements – such as OpenAI’s ambition “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity” yet fail to characterize the day-by-day operations of their authors, which leads to a gradual vacating of the meaning itself.
Beyond 2030 : The Hybrid Development Goals
The HDGs build on the SDGs and adapt them for today’s world where technology, capital, human un-wellbeing and planetary limits converge. They rest on the proposition that human flourishing, economic growth and planetary health must be addressed simultaneously, neither in sequence nor in competition.
Key principles include:
Means + Needs: Every dollar of investment should expand human capability and increase quality of life, in harmony with the planet, reducing baseline necessity.
Profit + Purpose: Doing well and doing good become structurally aligned, not rhetorically juxtaposed, with an understanding of the win-win-win-win of the quadruple bottomline.
Present Gains + Future Costs: Lifecycle impacts of technology and business matter as much as upfront returns. The responsibility for future generations is systematically integrated as a business constraint and a latent opportunity to think beyond the box of today’s limitation, making social change an intersectorial endeavor.
Values + Value Chains: Externalities must be internalised through financial and regulatory design. The deliberate shift from a return on investment logic to a return on values dynamic is pursued at scale.
Material + Immaterial: Education, health, planetary dignity and social cohesion count alongside money, energy, data and infrastructure. Hybrid development encompasses internal and external, tangible and intangible goals – making growth a transdisciplinary, intergenerational journey.
A Hybrid Financing Architecture For The Hybrid Era
To make the HDGs operational, we need versatile yet concrete instruments. Let’s entertain six, mutually complementary options for starters. The present list focuses on AI as the present hype of the day, the same logic must apply to still emerging technologies – from robotics to quantum computing.
AI‑SDG Linkage Levy: A small levy, say 2 % on AI infrastructure and 1.5 % on AI revenues, dedicated to hybrid development platforms.
Carbon‑Adjusted Development Bonds: Sovereign securities whose interest rates vary with measurable progress on emission reduction and SDG indicators.
Corporate HDG Portfolio Requirement: Tech firms required to allocate a portion (e.g., 10 %) of R&D to projects advancing human health and wellbeing, clean energy, water security, or equitable access to AI.
Planetary Impact Accounting Standards: Mandatory disclosure of environmental and social footprints across supply chains, turning externalities into quantifiable financial metrics. The ProSocial AI Index, with 4T’s to assess present and future AI-systems in view of their social impact.
Regional HDG Accelerator Funds: Blended public‑private vehicles de‑risking investments in prosocial/green infrastructure in emerging markets.
Technology Transfer Protocols: Publicly‑funded breakthroughs made available to low‑income countries under cost‑plus terms, ensuring innovation diffusion, not hoarding.
Why Economists And Humans Should Care, Today
From a classical economic view, when production inputs (capital, data, energy) decouple from social and environmental outputs, systems falter. The HDG framework links them via measurable mechanisms, from pricing to governance design, making the pursuit of prosocial ambitions appealing, both from a material and an immaterial perspective:
For businesses, alignment with HDGs reduces regulatory risk, attracts purpose‑driven capital, and ensures long‑term resilience.
For governments, smart alignment of fiscal tools with planetary constraints enables growth that is both sustainable and meaningful.
For investors, hybrid development opens trillion‑dollar opportunities in climate resilience and impact finance.
For humans – each of us – the HDGs reconnect progress with meaning. They remind us that prosperity isn’t measured by code or capital alone, but by wellbeing, dignity, and shared possibility.
Simplified Takeaway : 4 Practical Steps
We don’t have a shortage of capital. We have a misalignment of flows. The world’s funds are abundant but often directed into extraction or speculation, not regeneration. The Hybrid Development Goals offer a market‑friendly mechanism to channel capital toward shared prosperity in harmony with the planet. Four practical steps can get us started:
1. Micro – Reframing our mindset, from winner‑loser to win‑win‑win‑win: people, planet, profit, potential.
2. Meso – Redirecting institutional flows from extraction to regeneration, by embedding regenerative intent.
3. Macro – Internalizing environmental and social costs into financial and regulatory architectures.
4. Meta – Linking technological growth with human and planetary returns.
Put in straightforward economic terms: It is time to internalize externalities at scale – and this time, not as an optional approach, but as a large -scale commitment to transformation that follows the law of common sense.
The Hybrid Win-Win-Win-Win Of An Inclusive Future
It is time for a deliberate shift from the prevailing zoom on a return on investment to maximize the potential of a return on values framework.
It’s a win-win-win-win for the people we are, the communities we belong to, the countries we are part of and the planet we depend on. The time for hybrid change is now, from the inside out. The commitment to Hybrid Development Goals could take us not only beyond 2030, but to a brighter horizon.