Join us at the Dyson School of Design Engineering for a series of seminars on Responsible AI, featuring expert speakers who will share their insights on how to develop and deploy AI systems responsibly. The series is chaired by Professor Rafael Calvo.
Talk Abstract
AI has become a central subject of international governance. Governments are developing new regulatory frameworks, international institutions are proposing global principles and standards, and a growing architecture of AI summits, safety institutes and diplomatic initiatives is taking shape. Beneath this apparent convergence lies a more difficult question: who has the power to shape and control the AI systems on which societies are becoming increasingly dependent?
This talk examines the emerging global governance of AI through the lenses of power, inequality and technological sovereignty. Drawing on findings from the Global Index on Responsible AI, as well as experience working with governments and international organisations across Africa and the wider global system, I will explore the growing gap between global commitments to responsible AI and states’ actual capacity to govern it.
We will explore how the most consequential questions in AI governance now extend beyond regulation, concerning control over infrastructure, compute, models, data and expertise; the concentration of technological power within a small number of companies and countries; and the ability of governments – particularly in the Global Majority – to exercise meaningful agency over technologies increasingly embedded in their economies and public institutions.
The talk will consider what a genuinely global system of AI governance would require if it is to do more than manage the risks created by today’s distribution of technological power. It asks how international cooperation might instead help shape an AI future in which the benefits, capabilities and decision-making power associated with AI are more widely shared, and in which responsible AI is understood not only as a technical or regulatory challenge, but as a question of global justice.
Speakers Bio
Dr Rachel Adams is the Executive Director and Research Professor at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), University of Cambridge. She is also the Founding CEO of the Global Centre on AI Governance, established in 2023, and an Honorary Research Fellow at The Ethics Lab, Department of Medicine, at the University of Cape Town.
Rachel is an internationally recognised expert on AI governance, global inequality, and the political economy of emerging technologies. Her research and policy work sits at the intersection of AI, development, human rights, geopolitics and global justice, with a particular focus on how AI is reshaping power relations between states, corporations, and communities in the Global South.
She has advised governments and international organisations across Africa, Europe, and beyond, and was one of the lead drafters of the African Union Commission’s Continental AI Strategy, a landmark framework shaping the future of responsible AI on the continent. She serves on numerous international expert committees and advisory boards, including for UNESCO, the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office of the UK, the UNDP, the Gates Foundation, and the Global Partnership on AI.
Rachel holds degrees in English Literature, International Human Rights Law, and Philosophy, and has published widely on AI governance, technology and inequality, digital empire, and the ethics and politics of innovation. She is the author of three books, including The New Empire of AI: The Future of Global Inequality (Polity Press, 2024), and is currently working on a follow-up book on AI, development, and geopolitics.