Almost every day, we are presented with headlines celebrating Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) potential to transform our future, only to be met with equally frequent warnings about its potential to bring about humanity’s demise. In this age, AI has emerged as one of the most transformative and rapidly developing industries, reshaping the way people live, work, and engage with technology on a daily basis, leading to what some call the next industrial revolution. Its potential is enormous: better healthcare, higher productivity, faster innovation, and new solutions to development challenges that could ultimately lead to utopia.

Yet the same forces driving that promise could just as easily drive humanity toward catastrophe. The UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI finds that governance and risk-mitigation efforts are struggling to keep up with AI’s rapid development, while countries remain deeply unequal in their capacity to understand and respond to its risks and impacts. Concerns over data privacy, algorithmic bias, deepfakes, job displacement, autonomous weapons, and the loss of human judgment in critical decisions are no longer hypothetical. These issues are already affecting societies, yet much of the technology and the power to govern it remains concentrated in only a few countries and companies (Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, 2026).

Against this backdrop, this session will explore on where should AI receive the green light, and where must we draw the red line? Who should decide these boundaries? And how can we ensure that AI continues to serve humanity without widening the divide between those who shape the technology and those who merely live with its consequences?