Nguyen Anh Tuan
Founder and Chief Architect of AIWS
Co-Founder, Co-Chair and CEO, Boston Global Forum
Distinguished organizers, scholars, strategists, technology leaders, peacebuilders, and friends,
Thank you for convening this conference, and for placing developing nations and their communities at its center.
Artificial intelligence is changing the foundations on which peace depends. It can alter the balance of power among nations, concentrate economic and political authority, transform how societies understand reality, and place consequential decisions beyond meaningful human control.
Changes at that depth require a response at the level of civilization.
Sustainable peace in the AI Age requires an architecture that preserves human sovereignty, makes power accountable, and enables people and nations to create their future together. That is the purpose of AIWS Civilization.
I THE THREATS TO PEACE IN THE AI AGE
I see five connected dangers.
First: speed beyond judgment.
AI accelerates military targeting, cyber operations, surveillance, and strategic decision-making. When opposing systems interact at machine speed, an error or a misread signal can escalate before responsible leaders have time to understand it, communicate, and intervene.
The danger deepens when no one can establish who authorized an action, or how to stop it.
Peace requires time for judgment, restraint, and diplomacy. That time must be preserved inside systems built for speed. Decisions over life and death must remain under legitimate and meaningful human authority.
Second: the concentration of power and the erosion of sovereignty.
Control over advanced models, computing infrastructure, chips, and data gives a small number of states and corporations extraordinary influence over the choices of everyone else.
For developing nations, access to AI can carry dependencies they cannot easily negotiate or escape.
For individuals, systems that understand behavior acquire growing power to shape it.
A world in which a few actors design the future and everyone else adapts to it will generate lasting tension over sovereignty, dignity, and opportunity. A fairer distribution of the capacity to shape technological change is a condition of a stable international order.
Third: the destruction of trust in public life.
AI makes impersonation, fabricated evidence, and targeted manipulation cheaper and easier to distribute. When people cannot distinguish authentic communication from manufactured persuasion, confidence in institutions and in one another erodes.
Building AIWS Civilization · Silicon Valley Peace Conference · 18 September 2026 2In a crisis, uncertainty about whether a statement, an image, or an order is genuine can convert fear into retaliation.
Peace depends on a public environment in which evidence can be examined, sources challenged, and errors corrected.
Fourth: economic exclusion and the loss of human purpose.
AI may generate enormous wealth while leaving many people with fewer ways to earn, contribute, and develop their abilities. The issue reaches past employment. People need a meaningful place in society; communities need confidence that development includes them.
When the gains concentrate and the costs of disruption fall on those with the least influence, resentment hardens into instability.
A peaceful AI economy must expand human capability and recognize human contribution.
Fifth: the quiet weakening of human control.
As AI gains autonomy, the distance widens between a human instruction and the actions taken to fulfill it. A system may pursue a legitimate objective through means no one authorized. Responsibility then disperses across developers, operators, and institutions until it rests nowhere.
Dependence on automated judgment can also erode the human expertise required to supervise these systems.
Human control is rarely taken. It is given up — gradually, as we lose the ability to understand, to question, and to decide.
These dangers reinforce one another. Concentrated power deepens dependence. Manipulation intensifies exclusion. Weak accountability allows a local failure to become an international crisis.
A coherent answer must connect security, governance,
Please read the complete PDF here: https://bostonglobalforum.org/wp-content/uploads/Building-AIWS-Civilization-Silicon-Valley-Peace-Conference.pdf