July 31, 2025 (Thursday, 17:00 -18:00 JST)
Venue: Mirai Crea, 2F, Large Conference Room
About the Webinar
Reimagining global governance of AI is becoming an increasingly pressing problem to counter harmful effects on societies and the planet. In this lecture Dr. Somya Joshi will be presenting a framework for governing AI as a global common across security, societal and environmental domains, with a specific focus on compute, data, and energy as regulatory dimensions. Human technological evolution can be understood through three major paradigms. The first focused on the transformation of materials, spanning from the Stone Age through the Bronze and Iron Ages, where humans developed increasingly sophisticated ways to manipulate their physical environment. The second paradigm, also known as the Industrial Revolution, centered on the transformation of energy. Each revolution introduced new tools, industries, and fundamentally impacted lifestyles. Similarly, AI – as another iteration of said technological revolutions – is impacting human life, social dynamics, and our planet, while simultaneously posing direct safety risks to peace and sustainability. This rapidly co-evolving system requires deliberate interventions to avert negative outcomes and ensure that AI’s benefits are equitably distributed. Several key efforts to regulate AI at a global scale have emerged, ranging from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), to the EU’s AI legislation, the African Union’s new focus on AI governance in its AI strategy, the UNESCO’s guidelines, the UN’s high level panel on Digital Cooperation, the recent BRICS statement & the UN’s Global Digital Compact. These efforts are crucial to align AI with human and planetary interests. However, they remain fragmented and present a wide and often divergent field of AI risks and issues, sometimes played against each other, resulting in a lack of coherence.
In this lecture, Dr. Joshi will present a proposed framework and lens via which policy coherence can be achieved and the development of AI can be treated as a global commons.
About the Speaker
Dr. Somya Joshi
Somya Joshi is Research Director and chairs the AI Task Force at Stockholm Environment Institute. She is a Docent (Associate Professor) at Stockholm University in Technology & Governance. Somya’s research has been situated between cognitive sciences and technology design, particularly in how data & systems translate into transparency and accountability in governance. She has over fifteen years of experience bridging science and policy for sustainable development and challenging entrenched narratives of extractivism within technology disruption. Somya has held leadership roles in science-policy frontiers with a strong focus on decarbonisation, industry transition, climate governance and using futures thinking to bring about systemic change that is aligned with planetary limits. After being awarded her doctoral degree from Manchester, UK in decision science, Somya was offered a post doctoral position at Cambridge University, UK, in Information Systems, applying a critical lens on the efficacy of Global Development Organisations. This experience allowed her to participate in international development cooperation and methods development related to multi-level governance, with a particular focus on global goals. Today, Somya leads global voices in the field of Sustainable AI, delivering keynote talks at international fora, whilst also leading academic research, supervision and mentoring of PhD and post-doctoral researchers.
About the NERPS Webinar Series
The Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) at Hiroshima University in Japan is hosting a series of webinars on the relationship between peace and sustainability in the context of environmental, socio-political, economic, and technological transformations. This series is situated within the urgent need to deal with the implications of global change, including the COVID-19 pandemic, for peace and sustainability. The webinar sessions serve as a platform for rethinking and updating the current discourse on peace and sustainability amidst these global challenges and transformations. Leading experts will discuss the role of resources, digital technologies, migration, governance, and education in peacebuilding, conflict mitigation, humanitarian aid, and capacity-building, among other components that contribute to the achievement of the Sustainability Development Goals, particularly that of Goal 16 on Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. Check out our previous webinars here.
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