As 2025 nears its end, many of us pause to reflect on the year’s achievements, milestones, and challenges. Among them, one milestone stands out with particular clarity: 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 the GAFG together with SilkRoad 4.0, the European Perspectives scientific magazine, IFIMES and a wide consortium of international partners, the course brought together speakers and participants from all continents for eight intensive weeks of learning, exchange, dialogue, and discussion. Out of this initiative, an e-book was born: a collaborative volume that captures not only what we discussed, but how we learned to think together about a rapidly changing technological landscape.

This e-book is not simply a record of lectures. It is a reflection of a shared effort to understand what kind of future we are building with artificial intelligence and robotics, and under which conditions that future can remain human-centred, ethically grounded, and globally inclusive.

From the very first sessions, one message appeared again and again in different forms: artificial intelligence and robotics are not primarily about machines. They are about people, about how we choose to organize our societies, protect what is fragile, and build what is possible. The most meaningful questions discussed were not “How powerful can AI become?” but “What kind of world will we build around it?” and “What principles should we insist on when speed and convenience tempt us to compromise?”

AI is often introduced with a kind of theatricality. We hear about “revolutions,” “disruption,” and the race toward ever more capable models. We are told to admire the speed of progress, or to fear it. The reality is less cinematic and more consequential. AI does not arrive all at once. It steps into our lives through decision systems, sensors, workflows, and interfaces. It enters quietly, through a hospital triage queue, a factory maintenance schedule, an airport arrival sequence, or a fraud-detection engine that decides whether a payment goes through.

And because it arrives quietly, it can reshape society before we have agreed on the rules of the society it is reshaping.

That is why this e-book matters. It does not treat AI and robotics as distant abstractions, nor as a purely technical discipline reserved for engineers. Instead, it approaches the subject the way it appears in real life: as a cross-sector, cross-border phenomenon with ethical, economic, political, cultural, and security dimensions. The chapters are grounded in global dialogue, voices that do not always share the same assumptions, but share something more valuable: a willingness to compare perspectives without reducing the other side to a caricature.

A book born from a conversation

This publication emerged from a learning environment intentionally designed as a meeting ground, one where different generations, geographies, and professional cultures could think together under conditions that encouraged candor, curiosity, and respectful disagreement. When discussions happen across continents, with participants from different sectors, the questions change. They become more grounded, and often more honest.

Instead of asking, “What can AI do?” we begin to ask, “What should we allow it to do, and under which conditions?” Instead of “Who will win the AI race?” a more useful question becomes, “How do we prevent the benefits of AI from being captured by a few, while its harms spill onto the many?” And perhaps the most human question of all: “How do we preserve dignity and agency when systems around us grow more automated, faster than our social norms and institutions can adapt?”

These are not theoretical puzzles. They are policy questions. They are business questions. They are questions of social cohesion, security, and public trust. In different ways, every chapter in this volume returns to the same insight: governance is not an obstacle to technology. It is the condition for technology to serve society rather than destabilize it.

From fascination to responsibility

It is easy to be fascinated by AI. It is also easy to be overwhelmed by it. In this e-book you will encounter both optimism and caution, and you will see why both are necessary.

Optimism is necessary because AI and robotics are already proving their value in areas that matter deeply: earlier detection of disease risk, safer collaboration between humans and machines, more efficient logistics, improved cybersecurity, and better access to services for people who are currently excluded. The promise is real. And for many societies, especially those that cannot afford long cycles of experimentation or expensive failures, the prospect of doing more with fewer resources is profoundly attractive.

Caution is necessary because AI scales. It scales bias as efficiently as it scales insight. It can amplify misinformation, concentrate power, and tempt institutions to substitute automation for accountability. It can be deployed at a speed that outpaces democratic oversight, legal adaptation, and public understanding. In other words, AI is not only a tool. It is a multiplier of whatever we build into it: our assumptions, our values, our blind spots, and our incentives.

If there is one lesson I carried away from the conversations that shaped this e-book, it is that “human control” is not a slogan. It is a system. It requires transparency, auditability, and the capacity to challenge decisions. It requires education and digital literacy, not only for engineers but for citizens. It requires institutions that can respond to technological change without becoming captive to it. And it requires the courage to admit uncertainty, because in high-impact domains, false certainty is not confidence. It is a hazard.

A perspective shaped by a complicated world

In a time of global tension, technological debates can quickly become political symbols. AI is sometimes treated as yet another arena of confrontation: who leads, who follows, who controls compute, data, and resources. Those dynamics are real. But they do not replace the deeper reality that AI is becoming a shared environment. Code travels. Ideas travel. Risks travel. The health of our information ecosystems, the security of our digital infrastructures, and the resilience of our critical systems increasingly depend on choices made far beyond any single border.

This is why the ethos behind this e-book, dialogue, cooperation, inclusion, is not naive. It is strategic. In domains where proliferation is rapid and barriers are low, isolation is a fantasy. The alternative to cooperation is not control; it is fragmentation. And fragmentation increases risk: incompatible standards, uneven safeguards, and a race toward deployment without shared norms. The more fragmented the world becomes, the easier it is for failures, abuses, and miscalculations to spread across borders faster than any institution can respond.

The program that generated this e-book created something rare: a professional space where people with different passports and different assumptions could still speak the same language of responsibility. The chapters that follow do not insist on one ideology. They insist on something more practical: the need for frameworks that keep humans at the center, while allowing societies to innovate in ways that fit their realities.

What the reader should expect

You will not find a single “master theory” of AI governance in these pages. That is deliberate. AI is not one technology. It is a family of technologies embedded in many environments. Governance, therefore, cannot be one-size-fits-all. It must be contextual, tailored to the risks of each sector, sensitive to local conditions, and aware that different societies have different thresholds for surveillance, autonomy, and state-market relationships.

In other words, this is an e-book about AI and robotics, but it is also a guide to thinking in systems.

A small invitation

If you are reading this as a policymaker, you may be searching for actionable insights: what to regulate, what to fund, what to prohibit, what to promote. If you are reading as an executive or practitioner, you may be looking for competitive advantage and risk mitigation. If you are reading as a student or citizen, you may simply be trying to understand what is happening around you.

Wherever you stand, I invite you to read this e-book with two habits.

First, resist extremes. AI is neither salvation nor apocalypse. It is a set of powerful tools that will behave according to the constraints we place on them and the incentives we build around them.

Second, keep asking the implementation question. Not only, “Is this possible?” but: “Under what conditions is this safe, fair, accountable, and worthy of trust?” The future will not be decided by the most impressive demonstration. It will be decided by what survives contact with reality, and by whether societies can scale responsibility as effectively as they scale capability.

The most memorable moments of the program were not the moments of certainty. They were the moments when experts admitted complexity: when a technologist recognized the limits of a model, when a diplomat recognized the limits of regulation, when an artist reminded us that the human spirit is not an output to be optimized, and when participants from different continents asked each other, sincerely, how to build something that serves more than one interest.

That is the spirit of this e-book. It is a record of an encounter: between disciplines, between generations, between institutions, and between the human world and the machines we are creating.

As the e-book “Understanding AI & Robotics” is launched, my hope is that these pages will not only inform you but also steady you. The connectivity shift is already underway, and the most urgent task is not to watch it happen, but to shape it with reason, humility, and a deep respect for the lives that will be lived inside the systems we build.

Kamila Bogdanova
GAFG Multispatial Affairs Senior Officer

Email Office@future-governance.org to request your free copy