Despoina Giannakaki

The role of information systems (IS) in sustainability has increased, and so has the demand for sustainability skills and competencies as organisations and people pursue sustainable ways of operating and living for the planet, the plants, the people, and the profit. Educational institutions are critical in enabling sustainable development as they provide learning environments for sustainability education (SE). Universities worldwide are integrating SE into curricula to enable learners to develop essential sustainability competencies for various industries.

The IS curricula need a clear agenda for integrating SE to develop the essential skills and competencies for sustainable design and use of IS. Yet, the IS discipline lays the foundation for rethinking diverse information technologies (IT) in organisations and the everyday lives of individuals and groups.

We propose a critical investigation of how IS academics integrate SE into the current IS curricula. The study will reveal how the integrations are mapped to the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), the economic, social and governance (ESG) framework, and the external curricular bodies such as the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The investigation will reveal the targeted sustainability competencies essential for IS practice. The anticipated outcomes are intended to guide the integration of SE in IS curricula in universities and develop critical sustainability competencies for enduring IS practice.

Luck (2024) argues that being “rightly dominated” by a benevolent super-intelligent AI (super-AI) that would optimise our freedom by allowing as much as we need but not more, may be a good thing and provides analogies between God and super-AI playing this role. Our view is that such an approach is highly problematic if we have a grasp of how super-AI works (we will call this option one) and even more problematic if we don’t (option two)...