By Kamila Bogdanova
As 2025 drew to a close, reflection on the year’s achievements, milestones, and challenges brought one initiative into sharp focus: the creation of the Global Academy for Future Governance (GAFG) and its pilot project, the global online course “Understanding AI & Robotics: Their Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Spatial Implications for the Public and Private Sector.”
Conceived and delivered through GAFG in collaboration with SilkRoad 4.0, European Perspectives scientific magazine, IFIMES, and a broad consortium of international partners, the course united speakers and participants from all continents for eight intensive weeks of learning, dialogue, and exchange. From this collective effort emerged an e-book—an edited volume that captures not only what was discussed, but how participants learned to think together about a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
This publication is more than a record of lectures. It reflects a shared effort to understand the future being shaped by artificial intelligence and robotics, and the conditions required to keep that future human-centred, ethically grounded, and globally inclusive.
From the opening sessions, one message was clear: AI and robotics are not defined by machines alone. They are defined by people—by how societies are organized, how vulnerability is protected, and how opportunity is created. The most meaningful questions were not about how powerful AI might become, but about the kind of world built around it and the principles that must guide decisions when speed and convenience invite compromise.
AI often enters public debate framed by dramatic language—revolutions, disruption, races for dominance. The reality is more measured and more consequential. AI enters daily life incrementally: through hospital triage systems, factory maintenance schedules, airport logistics, and fraud-detection tools that quietly determine outcomes. Because these systems integrate gradually, they can reshape societies before shared rules and norms are fully established.
This is precisely why the e-book matters. It treats AI and robotics neither as abstract concepts nor as purely technical domains. Instead, it addresses them as cross-sector, cross-border phenomena with ethical, economic, political, cultural, and security implications. The chapters emerge from global dialogue among contributors who do not always share the same assumptions, yet share a commitment to serious exchange and comparative perspective.
A book born from dialogue
The publication grew out of a learning environment intentionally designed as a meeting ground for different generations, regions, and professional cultures. This diversity reshaped the questions under discussion. Instead of asking what AI can do, participants focused on what should be permitted and under which conditions. Instead of framing competition as a race to win, the discussion turned to preventing the concentration of benefits among a few while risks spread to many.
These questions are practical rather than theoretical. They concern public policy, corporate responsibility, social cohesion, security, and public trust. Across the chapters, a common insight emerges: governance does not hinder technological progress. It enables technology to serve society rather than destabilize it.
From fascination to responsibility
The e-book presents both optimism and caution—and shows why each is essential.
Optimism is grounded in reality. AI and robotics already deliver tangible benefits: earlier disease detection, safer human-machine collaboration, more efficient logistics, improved cybersecurity, and broader access to essential services. For societies with limited resources, these capabilities offer meaningful opportunities.
Caution is equally grounded. AI scales rapidly. It scales bias alongside insight, misinformation alongside efficiency, and power alongside innovation. It can move faster than democratic oversight, legal frameworks, and public understanding. AI is therefore not merely a tool; it amplifies the values, assumptions, and incentives embedded within it.
A recurring conclusion from the program is that human control requires systems, not slogans. Transparency, auditability, education, and digital literacy are essential—not only for engineers, but for citizens and institutions. Effective governance demands adaptability, institutional independence, and the willingness to acknowledge uncertainty. In high-impact domains, misplaced certainty creates risk rather than confidence.
A perspective shaped by a complex world
In a period of global tension, AI is often framed as a geopolitical instrument—who leads, who controls data, compute, and infrastructure. These dynamics matter, yet they do not alter a deeper reality: AI has become a shared global environment. Code, ideas, and risks move across borders with ease. Information ecosystems, digital security, and critical infrastructure increasingly depend on decisions made far beyond any single jurisdiction.
Against this backdrop, the ethos behind the e-book—dialogue, cooperation, and inclusion—emerges as a strategic necessity. In domains marked by rapid diffusion and low barriers, isolation is unrealistic. Fragmentation leads to incompatible standards, uneven safeguards, and accelerated deployment without shared norms. Such conditions increase systemic risk.
The program that produced this e-book created a rare professional space: one in which participants with different nationalities and assumptions spoke a common language of responsibility. The chapters do not promote a single ideology. They advocate frameworks that place humans at the centre while allowing societies to innovate according to their own realities.
What readers can expect
Readers will not find a single overarching theory of AI governance in these pages. This choice is intentional. AI encompasses a family of technologies embedded in diverse environments. Governance must therefore remain contextual—tailored to sector-specific risks, sensitive to local conditions, and aware of differing social thresholds regarding surveillance, autonomy, and the balance between state and market.
In essence, this is an e-book about AI and robotics, and also about systems thinking.
An invitation to engage
Policymakers may approach this volume seeking guidance on regulation, investment, and safeguards. Executives and practitioners may look for insight into competitiveness and risk management. Students and citizens may simply aim to understand the transformations unfolding around them.
Wherever readers stand, two guiding principles are worth keeping in mind. First, resist extremes. AI is neither salvation nor catastrophe. It is a powerful set of tools shaped by the constraints and incentives applied to it. Second, focus on implementation. The critical question is not only what is possible, but under what conditions innovation remains safe, fair, accountable, and worthy of trust.
The most memorable moments of the program were those marked by intellectual humility: when technologists acknowledged model limitations, when diplomats recognized regulatory constraints, when artists reminded participants that human creativity cannot be reduced to an output metric, and when individuals from different continents asked how to build systems that serve more than a single interest.
That spirit defines this e-book. It records an encounter—between disciplines, generations, institutions, and between the human world and the machines now being created within it.
As “Understanding AI & Robotics” is launched, the hope is that its pages will inform and steady readers alike. The connectivity shift is already underway. The most urgent task is not to observe it, but to shape it with reason, humility, and respect for the lives that will unfold within the systems being built.
Request a free copy: Office@future-governance.org
About the author:
Kamila Bogdanova, is GAFG Multispatial Affairs Senior Officer
