We need a new understanding of sustainability + four new SDGs for a Digital World
Creating future in the era of digitality leads us to ESG-DP and connects with four new SDGs
By 2028, every industry will have more digital than industrial structures. This also means new hierarchies and ways of working.
But that also requires new frameworks. Using the example of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), I’ll show how they need to be expanded for the new era — because the current SDGs still reflect an industrial framework.
First, the foundation: sustainability. We often refer to the ESG criteria — Environment, Social, and Governance. In light of new technological possibilities, we must add two more dimensions: Data and People, forming the acronym ESGDP.
Why? Because with AI and further technological developments, we’ll create entirely new societal and economic interconnections. Whereas technology previously defined our framework, in the future it is human imagination that will. Technology empowers people with new capabilities.
Until now, technology always predetermined its purpose. If I get into a car, I am either the driver or passenger. On a plane, pilot or passenger. In an office building (also a form of technology), my role is defined by the building’s design and my job description within an industrial framework.
With AI, it’s different. Technology no longer dictates what I can do with it. My imagination does. This shifts much more power and responsibility from structures and processes to the individual. That’s a novelty for us.
Computers were a precursor but were still tightly embedded in industrial processes, so we never fully realized their potential. Now with AI, we have a new form of technology — one that requires the newly described hierarchical structures in order to integrate it into workflows and harness the full potential of the human-technology combination.
We also need new guiding principles to manage these possibilities responsibly. Building on the new understanding of sustainability, these are the SDGs of the digital age:
1. Digital Self-Determination and Data Autonomy
Everyone has the right to decide how their data is collected, used, and interpreted — in private life, at work, in projects, and even as the foundation for new business models.
2. Developing Technological Consequence Awareness
Technology should only be used where people can understand, reflect upon, and shape its impact. This brings ethical questions into real-world practice, aligned with a new societal understanding.
3. Human Flourishing and Neurodivergent Potential Development
The diversity of human thought and life forms is a crucial resource for future viability — it must be protected and nurtured. This includes inclusive education systems (where inclusive means for everyone, not only for those labeled “disabled” as is often misunderstood today) and pluralistic forms of work and life.
4. Digital Democracy and Algorithmic Transparency
Democracy must be protected in the digital space just as in the physical world — through transparent algorithms and open governance systems. This applies not only to society but also within companies, ensuring a constructive connection between civil society and business models.
These four new SDGs clearly show how the world of work is changing — and why it makes sense to have coffee together beforehand. Because these goals require collaborative interaction, not competitive behavior like during industrialization.
The new D (Data) and P (People) in ESGDP force us to answer: “Who decides what work is — a human or an algorithm?” And just as importantly: “On what foundation do our economy and society stand — on people or algorithms?”
Probably both. But then it becomes a matter of our awareness of consequences, our digital self-determination, data autonomy, and human flourishing, as well as democratic cooperation, how we use this new connection. It must be equally accessible to everyone — only then can sustainable quality of life and economic wellbeing emerge.