Gabriela Ramos speaks at CCG
June 16 , 2025Assistant Director-General and DG candidate for 2025-2029 talks on ethical AI governance and a more inclusive, innovative, impactful UNESCO
▲Video | Wang Huiyao in dialogue with Gabriela Ramos
On 16 June 2025, Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences of UNESCO, visited the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) to deliver a keynote speech and hold a discussion with CCG President Henry Huiyao Wang on the ethical foundations of artificial intelligence development.
She also engaged in live Q&A with Zhang Linghan, Professor at the Institute of Data Law, China University of Political Science and Law; Zeng Yi, Professor at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, who also served on the Ad-Hoc Expert Group that drafted the UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence; and a journalist from CGTN.
A Mexican economist and diplomat, Gabriela Ramos began her public-policy career in Mexico’s foreign service before moving to the OECD, where she rose to become Chief of Staff to the Secretary-General and the Organisation’s G20/G7 Sherpa (2008-2020).
In 2020, Ramos was appointed Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences. From this platform, she coordinated the drafting and unanimous adoption of the 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence—the first global normative instrument on AI.
In March 2025, the Government of Mexico formally entered Ramos as its candidate for the UNESCO 2025-2029 Director-General position, making Ramos the first Latin-American woman in nearly two decades to seek the Organisation’s top post.
The following transcript is based on the video recording and has not been reviewed by any of the speakers.
Henry Huiyao WANG, Founder and President, Center for China and Globalisation (CCG)
Your Excellency, Madam Gabriela Ramos, and also distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
It’s really a great honour for me to be here at CCG to welcome Gabriela Ramos, the Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, visiting CCG, but also visiting China. She’s going to give us a great speech and also a discussion, and we’re going to have a dialogue with her. So it’s really a great honour for me to welcome her and to be at this very special event.
The “CCG Global Dialogue” series has been carried out over the last five years. Actually, we have had dialogues with hundreds of world leaders, opinion-leading experts, politicians, statesmen, foreign ministers, and, of course, government officials and think tank leaders. We are very pleased today that we have another important guest added to our edition of the “CCG Global Dialogue” series.
I’d like to first invite Madam Gabriela Ramos. Madam Gabriela Ramos is, of course, a very distinguished Mexican economist and diplomat, currently serving as Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences at UNESCO. As we all know, UNESCO is a well-known UN organisation and has a great impact throughout the world. In her capacity, she leads initiatives aimed at fostering inclusive and, of course, peaceful societies, with a focus on social inclusion, gender equality, youth development, anti-racism, and, of course, the ethics of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and neurotechnology. These are very, very new areas in which she has demonstrated great leadership.
We have a very impressive CV of Madam Ramos. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from a university in America and a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School. And, of course, she has a very impressive career. Madam Ramos began her career advising Mexican Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Budget, later co-founding a consultancy that enabled voting rights for Mexicans abroad and protected the Laguna San Ignacio’s biosphere.
Of course, I began to know Madam Ramos when she was working at the OECD, a very important organisation based in Paris. She actually worked as Director for the OECD’s México Centre. She contributed to major reforms, including the “Seguro Popular” health program and Mexico’s competition laws. Most importantly, at OECD in Paris, she became Cabinet Director to Secretary-General José ?ngel Gurría and the organisation’s first G20 Sherpa. She often attended the G20 summit on behalf of the OECD, leading initiatives like the Business for Inclusive Growth (B4IG) platform and overseeing strategic reforms, and expanded the budget by 68% and added 8 member countries. Very impressive. I remember, quite a few years back, when the OECD hosted the first international immigration ministers’ meeting, I accompanied China’s delegation of the National Immigration Administration attending that meeting. We were well received by OECD leaders, including Madam Ramos.
And of course, there’s more. After a successful career at the OECD, Madam Ramos was appointed as Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences at UNESCO in 2020. That’s another very important organisation. Since then, her term has been marked by transformative initiatives aimed at reinforcing UNESCO’s role at the intersection of science, policy, and ethics. There’s been quite a big achievement under her leadership. One of the key achievements of Madam Ramos was the drafting and adoption of the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in November 2021 by UNESCO’s 193 member countries. This is really important, as we know that AI is becoming a very important subject in the current international arena and also gets so much attention.
As a global organisation under the UN, UNESCO has taken this groundbreaking work—the first of its kind globally—to provide ethical guidance and development for the deployment of AI. So this is really very impressive. By mid-2024, over 60 countries had incorporated the principles into their institutional and legal frameworks, facilitated by the Readiness Assessment Methodology (RAM) developed under Madam Ramos’ guidance. Countries like Chile and Morocco have used those recommendations to draft AI policies and strategies, setting a good example for other countries worldwide. Additionally, the Women4Ethical AI initiative was launched, which leverages the knowledge of the leading artificial intelligence experts to advance gender equality in the AI arena.
As a key event in 2025, under UNESCO’s SHS patronage, the Global Forum on Ethics of AI was to promote behavioural change and also for those areas. And of course, climate action was also taken. The 2024 edition of the World Philosophy Day, titled “Philosophy: bridging social gaps,” highlighted philosophy’s vital role in mending the social fabric and fostering a more inclusive society.
The list goes on—for Madam Ramos’ achievements. She’s also a great expert on civilisation and has emphasised the importance of intercultural dialogue as a cornerstone for building sustainable and inclusive societies. She advocates for dialogue as a means to understand each other, cooperate, and develop trust, especially in the face of global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, and rising social and economic inequalities.
So I think this is really a great occasion that we have invited Madam Ramos to deliver a speech at CCG and have a dialogue with us. Her vision for UNESCO underscores the need for inclusion, innovation, and impact. She calls for greater access to quality education, ethical regulation of science and technology, and a strong influence in global forums to improve the quality of life for all.
I have known Gabriela for a number of years. I remember we were engaged in dialogue on civilisations, and both of us were on the Steering Committee for the Paris Peace Forum. Also, I’m very pleased to learn that you are running for the candidacy of Director-General of UNESCO as one of the strongest candidates for running for this position. So we really hope that your visit to China is very productive, and we hope your run for this candidacy will be successful.
So, without further ado, we would like to invite Madam Gabriela Ramos to give us a keynote, and then we will engage in a dialogue with you. Let’s welcome her.
Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General, UNESCO
Thank you so much, Henry, and great to see you and to engage in this discussion. I’m accompanied by my colleagues from the Mexican embassy, Francisco Antonio, good friends, Yi Zeng, and thank you for that wonderful introduction. It’s great to be in CCG, the place to be. I’m looking at all these amazing people that you have had from all over the years, and this is really a centre that promotes these exchanges that are so necessary today.
I come now as a candidate of Mexico for the Director-General of UNESCO, but as Henry mentioned, I have been in the multilateral system for many years, trying to make institutions count, trying to ensure that institutions, both at the OECD, but now at UNESCO, deliver solutions for the challenges we face. And I feel one of those challenges, of course, is how do we ensure that the impressive technological transformation that we are experiencing day by day delivers more inclusive and sustainable worlds.
And I feel this is where I would like to start, because at the end, international institutions are now under a lot of pressure. Multilateralism is being called into question. Some major powers are preferring the bilateral or even the unilateral option when we know that we are so interlinked, we are so connected. All of the challenges that we face, be it inequality or climate or migration or ageing or the environment, technologies, are global and transcend frontiers, and therefore we need more multilateralism and not less.
But that multilateralism needs to be effective, and I feel this is another angle. I just wrote an article at Le Grand Continent, which is one of the very prominent journals in France, reflecting on how do we ensure that we are not all the institutions packaged together and put in the waste basket, because at the end, there are differentiated impacts, there are differentiated outcomes, and there are differentiated successes of these institutions.
Yes, there’s a lot of need to reform many of the UN system. We have been dealing with it. It needs to be more agile, it needs to be more lean, it needs to be much more impactful. But there are so many good stories of effective multilateralism that we need also to recover and use it to promote and say, “Hey, no, not everything is wrong. There are some things that are working well.”
And one of these experiences is what Henry mentioned to you. UNESCO is very well known for the cultural sites, the World Heritage Sites. It’s very well known for education. It’s less known for science. But we actually were the institution that was established in 48, one of the oldest institutions of the UN system, to promote cooperation through education, culture, and science. And we have this mandate to promote investment in science, to protect scientists—again, the environment is not so great everywhere—and to ensure that scientific endeavours are allowed, open, financed, and that we build knowledge that is not constrained by any other issue than the need to reflect on how do we advance understanding of the challenges.
And one of the elements of UNESCO is that it has the ethics of science, the ethical framework for science and development. And this is important because you remember that during the Second World War, there was a lot of research that was not very ethical. And therefore, this is the idea behind this mandate of UNESCO.
We were the institution that, when the progress in the human genome was so fast that then we could even clone ourselves or clone the sheep—Dolly was cloned—and UNESCO came out with a very powerful message that I feel framed the discussion very nicely of all these technologies, which is: technologically, you can do those things. You can clone, you can repeat, you can provide. Morally, ethically, should you? So it’s just a question: should we?
And this is the same understanding that we carried forward when working on artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, of course, is this capacity of the computers, because of massive data gathering, because of the computer power, because of the iCloud, because of so many investments that countries like China and the U.S., particularly, have made. The computers can really produce intellectual outcomes that sometimes are even much more complex than what humans can make.
But the reality again, is that great, great that we have machine learning, great that we have generative AI, great that we have agentic AI, great that every now and then, we are seeing the exponential increase of these capacities, and we are in awe of the possibilities of what we can do with these technologies. But again, it’s not about the technologies. It’s about how do we use those technologies to build more inclusive societies. And if we take a picture of where we are in terms of the technology, of course, in November 2022, generative AI came in, it’s impressive. It’s impressive because, if you think about it—now we are very used to these things—but the fact these are technologies that learn from themselves.
So if you, in one corner of the world, are using one of these systems and you teach them by interacting with them on some information, on some issues, all the world will know about it. And therefore it’s just impressive. But then you have the reasoning AI, or this agentic AI, which is just also so impressive, because I can be replaced. You can be replaced. The Director-General of CCG can be replaced by an agent. They can do it. But again, how do we frame the issues so we ensure that it’s not just the technological breakthroughs that are so amazing, but the frameworks that we have as governments, as institutions, and as humans, to frame it?
I’m very happy because Yi Zeng is here with us. You were part of the group that developed the Recommendation on the Ethics of AI. And the beauty of the way the recommendation—these global standards—was developed is that it was not just the economists. I was with the economists at the OECD, and it was usually the staff that would draft things and then put it to member states to discuss it. In UNESCO, it is different. And I feel that the way this was framed is super interesting because we gathered a group of 24 experts from very different disciplines. And this is amazing because, of course, we have the geeks, we have the engineers, we have the economists, we have the financiers, but we also have the philosophers. We also have the psychologists. We also have the anthropologists.
And you know what happened? Then you have a well-rounded human experience together to think about: What do we need the technologies for? It’s not what the technologies can do, but what the technologies can do for us—for our problems, for our needs, for our ambitions. And therefore, the draft is a fantastic piece, because the call is to say, let’s step back, and instead of talking about the technology, let’s talk about us. Let’s talk about what kind of world we want, a world where we respect and promote human rights and human dignity, a world where we have fair outcomes, sustainable outcomes, where we advance gender equality, and then a world where these values that were defined by this group, as such representative of all the regions in the world, translate into principles: transparency, accountability, rule of law—all of the principles that all advanced societies have provided themselves to organise their living.
And then the beauty is that, because I’m a policy wonk, when I arrived, I said, All of this is very good, but where are the policy chapters? We need to translate that into policies, into decisions that governments can take. And therefore we look at the ethics of AI in education, in culture, in the labour market, in the economy, in the environment, gender equality, communications, education, etc. Therefore, it really turned into a standard that was very actionable. People could really reflect: What do we mean by this?
And then we went a step forward, as we have this divergence: you have the U.S. and China producing 80% of AI developments, large foundational models, frontier developments, the next generation and the next generation. And not only about artificial intelligence, but all the converging technologies: neurotechnology and synthetic biology, and all of the other developments that are also empowered by artificial intelligence. You have few countries that are doing so.
But then you have all of the rest of the countries that are users. But then you also have 30% of the world that has no access to stable internet, and you have a large majority of the citizens of the world that don’t know how to use these things, or that might be captured by the wrong use of the technologies with very difficult issues like misinformation or disinformation, or the impact of social networks in our youth, in our people, etc.
So what we decided was to do a diagnostic tool—again, not to talk about the technology, but how countries were prepared or not to use those technologies, and more importantly, how are they prepared to govern the technologies for themselves? Because, of course, this is a global conversation, but the ones that are going to put the rules whenever data privacy is abused, or whenever we are engaging in exchanges that are not right with the platforms, there needs to be somebody that is calling the attention.
And that’s why this initiative became very interesting, because you have countries from the Netherlands and India, Mexico, Brazil—China just developed the readiness assessment—to countries like Mozambique or Malawi or Cambodia. And the beauty is that each one of them sit by themselves, with their experts, with their business sector, with their academia, with their civil society, to discuss: What do they need the technologies for? What is their vision of the technology? And then to develop the rules to try to shape it.
And I’m sure that you have heard a lot about this false dilemma regarding whether regulations kill innovation, or you only can be innovative if there is no constraint, which I think is completely false. Therefore, we are trying to move from that conversation to one that is more organised in the sense that there are a lot of policy tools to shape the technologies.
And let me just take you to some of the issues. This is the most amazing progress in scientific breakthroughs and innovation, because it’s scientific developments that then turn into market developments that are used by the business or by our societies. One question that we should be asking ourselves is how much our countries are investing in R&D. And then, just forget about if we are in the world of AI or not—how much our countries are really investing in research and development. And you have from countries like China or Korea or the U.S. that are from six to four to five percentage points of GDP, to countries in other regions that invest less than 0.3 or 0.2 or 0.1. So it’s not about whether there are big techs wanting to sell everything; it’s about how you prepare yourself to be better at taking advantage of these technologies.
The skills—how do we develop the skills? I was always surprised to see, for example, that when President Biden delivered their executive order to frame the technologies, one of the elements of the U.S. was talent attraction, retention, and formation. So if the U.S., who is the leading force in these technological breakthroughs along with China, is putting the focus on talent, I guess that we all should be looking into investing in talent.
And the other part, which is one of the most interesting for me, is the capacities of governments to use the technologies for good. When you talk to the governments and you go around, they don’t want to become the experts on how the generative AI functions, or how the open source or not open source or the DeepSeek happened or didn’t happen—that’s not what they want to know. What they want to know is how they can ensure that they can develop a model that will help them to manage their health sectors, their education sectors. And this is where the whole thing can be turned around.
And this is one of the impacts of this work that UNESCO has done—that has provided a sense of agency to each government to understand that it is them that can turn the thing into something that is useful. And that means investing in the capacities of governments to understand these technologies, developing the regulations and the legal frameworks.
I just got to see that three years ago, Senator Peters from the U.S. was just pushing a bill to ensure that those people who are in the public procurement systems of the U.S. will know what AI is, which is very interesting, but it’s true—if you are going to go to the market to buy some platforms or some programmes to do things, you need to know how to protect the thing.
So the fact is that investing in our own capacities to use the technologies is very important. And I don’t want to belittle the fact that we need to know the technologies. That’s true because, with each generation of the technological breakthroughs, the answers that we thought we had found for some challenges change completely.
If you remember, when we were looking at the earlier models of artificial intelligence 10 years ago, there was research saying 50% of the jobs were going to disappear. Then we entered into something that it is not about the jobs, it’s about the tasks. So it’s not the whole category, but the task that will be replaced and automated by artificial intelligence.
And then we thought, yes, it’s the task that can be codified. So it will be middle-level skills that are going to be completely replaced. And everybody was very worried because it’s going to be the typist, the one that makes the reservation, the thing that is repetitive is going to be codified, and forget, those jobs are going to disappear.
Well, we were developing policies to protect those people, to upskill them, to invest in their capacity to do something else, for redeployment, for organisational moves to ensure that these things do not hurt people. But then with generative AI, it comes, the level of capacities of these technologies is way higher than just repetitive tasks. And then we come to realise that it’s going to be replacing also the white-collar workers. And it might be replacing the lawyers, or might be replacing some engineers, because the technologies can code.
And as I said, every now and then, the capacities are increasing, and then new challenges come because the challenges of being discriminated by an algorithm that is being used to take a decision was almost pushed aside because of the safety challenges—and you remember the AI Safety Summit in the UK—because the reality is that if you have this open source and the capacity of anybody coding, then it can be misused also. And it can be very dangerous. And that’s why the Secretary-General established the advisory board, and then we worked to get the [Global] Digital Compact.
At the end, it’s about grappling with the issues. I feel that because of the work of UNESCO, more countries are better prepared to understand how the technologies work, and more importantly, what they need to do.
One of the proudest moments I have as Assistant Director-General was with the Minister of Cambodia, Chea. I had not met him because, of course, 70 countries are being worked with teams that we have all over the world. So it’s not that I travel to each of the countries. But he was there at the Action Summit in France, and he came to see me, and he said, “I want to thank you, because you know, this work that I did with UNESCO has allowed me to know what I need to do.” That’s fantastic. If a minister comes to you and says, “Your work has helped me to understand what I need to do,” then we have the lever. I think that’s the way it goes.
So this is the kind of experiences that I think it would be important that we try to reproduce—that every time we get together in the global community, with 194 very different voices around the table, that we get this commitment to frame the issues in the right way. I think that that’s exactly what the world has done with the climate agreement in Paris, with the Nationally Determined Contributions. That’s what we did in the OECD when we reformed the international tax system to avoid tax evasion and tax erosion. That’s what we have done when we go into rules for gender equality.
The only point is that agreements are fantastic, implementation is much better. And this is my experience in life. So I think I will leave it there so that we can proceed to discuss how to ensure a future with AI that is more sustainable, but also how do we ensure that international institutions that are called to address these issues globally can continue delivering for good. Thank you so much.
Dialogue with Henry Huiyao Wang
Henry Huiyao WANG
Great. We have a great audience here. We also have experts Professor Zhang and Professor Zeng, embassy staff, and many think tank experts and media friends. So, Madam Gabriela Ramos, you made a very good speech just now and outlined a lot of your perspectives and ideas—how global governance should be carried out, and also AI development, and what’s the importance and contribution there.
I know you have been with the OECD for almost 20 years, and also as the Chief of Staff, G20 Sherpa. Also, you mentioned many things achieved at the OECD, like the global minimum tax proposal, right? That was really a very, very important initiative. And then for the last several years, you have been at UNESCO, looking after many areas, but also pioneering this ethical foundation for global governance on AI. So those really need a lot of vision and a lot of, as you mentioned, implementing leadership by the implementing power.
So, probably from your experience for the last two or three decades on global institutions, what are your thoughts on how we can really achieve better governance in a multilateral system? How are you managing different countries’ perspectives, and how do you really incentivise and work with them and with member countries, but also push the agenda forward? So you must have a lot of experience, ideas, and thoughts to share with us. That will be my first question: how can the global governance and multilateral innovation that you’ve engaged in for the last several decades really benefit the future development of global governance and the multilateral system? So, Madam Ramos, please.
Gabriela Ramos
Thank you so much for that question, because it’s true there you have Arancha González, who was my partner. She was a WTA Sherpa, and I was an OECD Sherpa. And she told me something that is very interesting. She said the institution lives the life of those that inhabit them. So it’s the quality of the leadership of the institutions, the quality of the engagement with member states, the quality of the relationship. It is the trust. And at the end, it is about people.
It’s so interesting because we can think about grandiose schemes and infrastructure, and it’s about people. It’s about having the good representative around the table who will understand the challenge, who will be committed to finding the solutions together, and who will be subject to the consensus rule, which sometimes is difficult for big powers because, in the consensus rule, you never get 100% of what you want. You will always get 80 or 70 or 60, and therefore, I feel it’s very important to have this quality of the environment. And you have the quality of that environment when you have trust and when you feel that going through the multilateral setting will deliver better than just going by yourself.
And I have been lucky, I might say, that I have—or probably it is also due to the work of my teams, myself, and the leaders that I work with—environments when things are possible. We saw it first and foremost: What happened with this recommendation? How did it happen? Because, for me, it’s a best practice, and we should always learn from best practices.
First, there was a strong leader. I was very strong. I was pushing. But then you have this group of experts that gave a lot of trust because countries felt in the way the thing was done that we have representatives from all the regions of the world. It would have been different if we came together and said, “Okay, guys, I asked my friend who is in the north now working on these issues to produce a document. This is it. Please discuss it.” It would have created a reaction. But because we did it in an inclusive manner, bringing people together. I mean, the chair of the group was a South African lady, and then we have China, we have the U.S., we have Africa, we have everybody together. It gave trust. But then you also need skilful leadership. And I think this is very important, because what I’m seeing in my campaign trail for the Director-General, decisions about heading international institutions are not always taken by merit.
And I know—I mean, I was not born yesterday. I know that there are bilateral considerations, there are geopolitical issues, there are questions of exchanges: support me here, I support you there. But it would be very important because the times I have seen when the leadership is strong are also because it’s the most capable leadership.
In my time at the OECD and then in the Social and Human Sciences Sector, it is very important that we do not—as I always said with the multilateral system—throw the baby out with the bathwater, because at the end it is what we put there. And when members or leaders criticise multilateralism, it should also be self-criticism, because you get what you put and you get how much you engage.
And I feel this is very important. You can have the setting for a good engagement and good outcomes, but if somebody doesn’t want to engage, then it becomes very difficult. What I have proposed now, because the world is so polarised and so fractured in so many ways—and as I said, not all the main powers want to engage in multilateralism—maybe for the time being, we will need to go for, how do you call it, differentiated geometry, in which those actors that really want to push hard will just run with the ball, and then we deliver.
And finally, lots of agility needs to be embedded in the system. International institutions need to be reformed every time. It needs to be a state of mind because things change. And many times, you are full of rules, and it becomes so ineffective that just to deliver on something becomes impossible. So I think these are the elements that I see.
Henry Huiyao WANG
Great, Gabriela, you strike me very deeply. I think you mentioned working with people; that’s very important for international organisation leaders, that you engage with different countries and different cultures.
So I know that you speak Spanish, French, and English, and you are a Harvard graduate, but most importantly, I think, while working at the OECD, you had a first-hand experience of seeing how engaging with different countries works—and now at UNESCO, with even more members. So that kind of engagement capability with the people and with the country becomes so important. And second, I agree with you on the reform—we just can’t really stand still; we have to go forward and innovate and push things forward, particularly in today’s very complex environment.
So my second question would be: How did you come up with these ethical studies, research, and policy arena of AI? As we all know, AI is developing rapidly, it’s also a competition among many countries, and it’s also very uncertain. There’s a risk, there’s a closed system; now there’s an open system, and then you can see really fierce competition among major countries.
But, of course, in modern geopolitical conflicts, we see AI deployed—it’s drones, you see AI operations everywhere. So in the future, there will also be many issues: ethical, and then safety, risk, and privacy—many, many things. So, how did you come about on this issue, and as an international organisation at the UN, to really look at those across the board—safety, ethical, global standards? We need a global governance initiative on that. So we’d like to know where that vision comes from and how that really has impacted the development of the AI arena in the world.
Gabriela Ramos
You’re completely framing this in a very nice way because at the end, it always seems that we are in a catch-up game. We finally understood the way the black box was producing something, and suddenly the whole foundation of how the models were developing changed.
We were thinking about ensuring quality data to avoid discrimination or to avoid the system or the whole model being wrongly built, and suddenly you have synthetic data, or suddenly you’re scraping the web. And therefore, what kind of conversation are we having about data if you are scraping the web? Then we started to talk about sources, and there was no quoting of the sources. Now there’s some quoting of the sources, but the quality of sources? If you go in trying to understand the technologies, there is always the catching up, because it’s very complex, and not all of us are experts on technology.
But that’s why we need to broaden the discussion, to put back the sense of agency in those who need to deliver for people. And in that sense, the best way I found to do that is to think about the outcomes and the impact of the technology. Because in that way, you are not trying to just define every single typology of what can go wrong, because I feel that’s very, very difficult. Of course, there are institutions that are doing it, and it’s good because then we learn. These institutes that were established by the U.S. or the UK or Japan—China has many experts doing it—to try to understand where things can go wrong and to put the systems into test to ensure that we know how to control the downside risks, which is fine.
But for me, it’s easier to think: okay, if I use an algorithm, as the Netherlands did, to help me administer better all the social welfare system and to avoid abuse, and then I develop my algorithm, and it’s fine. I mean, there’s proprietary coding, that’s fine. But then I get to see that thousands of migrants are being affected negatively. Then we say, excuse me, something is wrong with the model if you are just targeting migrants and cutting off their benefits. And it happens that it was biased, it happens that it was an overrepresentation of migrants as abusive.
Then, in that very moment, you need to be able to ensure accountability. And this is my concern. My concern is not the technology. My concern is the protection system that the rule of law has provided for us offline to be applicable online. It’s not that easy, because at the end, and more with generative AI and with open source, you have all these models that are accessible to everybody. And then you use one model, and you develop another model, and then if something goes wrong, to allocate responsibility is not as straightforward as it looks.
But at the end, these are the breaking points. The breaking point is the accountability of the systems and the possibility that you need to have. And the Recommendation included that, which I think was bright, because it said, no, I don’t need to be chasing all the coding, and I don’t need to be chasing all the algorithms. On the contrary, there are thousands that are producing magnificent outcomes everywhere. I don’t need to know. But if something goes wrong, I need to be able to establish a liability system that will help me redress the situation and compensate those who have been affected. If you organise the thinking in that way, of course, you will need to be advised by people who understand the coding and the technologies. But at the end, it’s more structured in a way that we can address it, not in a very complex manner.
Henry Huiyao WANG
Great, good. Okay, so my final question before I open it to our experts and our friends is that UNESCO is about culture, education, civilisation, and all those soft powers, referring to Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, who just passed away, as you are also a Harvard alumna.
What I would like to know is that, as a strong candidate for UNESCO’s future DG, what’s your vision for the future of UNESCO? And now we are in a more hard-power–filled world, and also with AI. But what about those soft powers—civilisation, education, culture, talents, all those things?
So I think we need to really use the softer power to balance the hard power. There’s too much hard power these days; everybody’s driving up a military budget. But let’s really come back to the basics of the soft power—using culture, empathy, sympathy, and also, you know, those more people-to-people exchanges: student, tourism, historical sites and heritage sites, and all those things that UNESCO is doing—that we can push the world to be a more safe place to live. So that would be my final question.
Gabriela Ramos
I would say that it’s the safe place to push for multilateralism, which is very interesting because I was at some point, as Sherpa of the OECD, in charge of tracking trade measures, in charge of tracking the financial crisis and the financial system meltdown, and the financial reform and the tax reform. I’m very happy I’m not now because it was tough enough.
I feel that this is the time exactly to enhance the impact of UNESCO, because UNESCO proposed exactly what you say: another way of connecting humanity in a shared vision. Because culture, education, science bring us the definition of what it means to be human. And it’s not trade, it’s not exchanges, it’s not the maximisation of profit or revenues. It’s exchanging who we are, where do we come from, where is our history, where is our memory, where is our common future.
What makes us the same as humans? Creativity, learning, exchanging. And I feel these are very powerful tools, as you say, if we deploy them in the right way. Because again, as I said in the beginning, it’s all about humans around the table really sharing the urgency of delivering for good. It’s the same in other areas.
And so what I want to do is to have UNESCO doing a quantum leap of the kind of services it has provided in the last years. First, to continue building the question of the technological transition and doing it in a really much more human values-based way, because that’s going to divide us more, or it’s going to bring us together more. No doubt about this impact, because technology is redefining the whole societal engagement and economic activities and everything.
But then education. But stepping back: education for what? For the past decades, education has been the platform that will equip young people to get a job, to be competitive, and to have individual success. No. I think we need to go back to education for citizenship, for peace, for critical thinking.
And it’s very interesting because these tools that are important for society living together are also the tools that will help us master technology. Because this critical thinking, this consciousness of what is the impact, the outcomes—it’s very important.
So, education—quality education—but broader in the sense of what kind of humans we want, which is not only the Homo economicus. Fine to register the heritage sites, but I would love to have more investments in culture, to bring culture to life, to take it out of the museums, and to engage people with creativity.
Because sometimes, when I came to China in the G20, every time the Sherpas would organise a huge presentation of the music, of the dances of the different regions in China—my God, you feel Chinese. You’re sitting there, you’re looking at that, and you’re like, That looks very Mexican in certain ways or not.
I think that we need to bring culture more into our development. And this is what I call the inclusive part of my programme, because my programme is inclusiveness, innovation, and impact. The second part, the innovation, is to really, really take advantage of the quantum leap that scientific endeavours are having for some countries to benefit everybody and to ensure that we have open science, and that we protect scientists, and that we protect freedom of speech.
Because the problem is that we’re having this mounting populism, dogmatism, ideology, digital platforms that are not helping, misinformation. And I think that freedom of speech and thought is very important. And by the way, we just got the Ethics of Neurotechnology Recommendation approved, so I’m very happy. And then the final point is: impact, impact, impact. So, inclusion, inclusiveness, innovation, and impact—that’s my proposal for UNESCO of the future.
Q&A
Zhang Linghan, Professor, Institute of Data Law, China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL)
Thank you. Ms. Ramos, it’s a really great honour to meet you. Let me introduce myself. My name is Zhang Linghan, and I’m a law professor from China University of Political Science and Law. I’m also a colleague of Professor Zeng Yi. We are both members of the UN High-Level Advisory Body on AI, and we are the two Chinese members.
I’m very happy to be here because, during our work in the UN High-Level Advisory Body on AI, we have sought out all the very influential AI global initiatives. We noticed that the earliest one is the OECD AI Principles, and the second earliest one is UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. This is the first time I knew it was all initiated by you. It’s such an honour to meet you and to have this opportunity to have a conversation with you.
My question is also about UNESCO’s future. I wish you good luck in your run for the DG, and I really like your slogan: inclusiveness, innovation, and impact. As you mentioned at the beginning of your speech, you mentioned that UNESCO is very famous for World Heritage and very famous for civilisation and culture, but not that famous for science. And actually, you have led such a great job on global AI governance, just like I mentioned, the OECD and UNESCO ethical code.
So my question would be: if you were to be DG, or in your future work, how would you like to enhance the impact of UNESCO on the science section? I mean, you have done so much great job led by UNESCO and exerted such a great impact on global AI governance. So I think maybe in the future, the science part and global AI governance part would be a very important part of UNESCO’s future vision. So I would like to know: what would you design to do? Thank you.
Gabriela Ramos
Great to meet you. And congratulations. I love your work for the advisory board, and I love it more because you quoted UNESCO. It was great. You made an amazing job with those two reports, and also the contribution that you did to the Global Digital Compact. So, congratulations.
I think that on science, first and foremost, international organisations can help to set up the agenda. I think that science is not as visible as it should be, and scientific cooperation is just somewhere down the road. We do it sometimes. It’s time for us to call countries accountable for their science ecosystem, for the investments in science and for the protection of scientists.
But also, it would be an amazing moment for UNESCO to launch scientific missions. It’s been a long time since we did something of the sort, but when we did that, we established the CERN, which is this accelerator of particles in Switzerland. That was a huge joint collaboration.
Why don’t we launch scientific missions to discuss certain issues? Let me propose just some of these issues that I’ve actually been discussing in the ethics work, because I have this committee of experts on ethics of science and technology and the International Bioethics Committee.
One of the things is the capacity that we have to modify the climate, the environment. Technologically, now that’s possible, and some institutions, particularly in the U.S., are looking at the way. If you remember when Iceland got this volcano erupting, and then it covered the whole world with the particles that prevented the worst solar rays from coming in. And then it gave these ideas to scientific people to say, Oh, we can do that? And if we do that, maybe we have another possibility to control climate change.
First, it feels like very scary. It’s possible, but it’s scary. Second, what if we get it wrong and we freeze the world? Third, who’s going to decide when should we use it or not? Those that can do it—there are three people in the world. How do we ensure that we organise an inclusive conversation on these issues? And that’s where UNESCO needs to be present, as we did with the ethics of neurotechnology—to think on very important scientific trends and discoveries that should not be the matter of the people that have the capacity to do it, but that should be inclusive because it will affect all of us.
And the other part is to call the attention that, because of the way the science ecosystem internationally is organised, it’s very difficult for some institutions in the Global South to be better represented due to the requirements and the issues. And so now you have 80% of the scientific outputs being just produced by the G20. And if you restrict the issues, it will be only again China, the U.S., the UK. This is lacking the diversity that we need of knowledge, of understanding, of vision, of ideas, of ambition of the Global South.
Therefore, I think that there is a very important role that UNESCO should play in bringing all knowledge to the table to try to learn from each other. And one of the angles, for example, that has been always commented on, but never structured in a very good way, is indigenous knowledge on so many things. How do we codify that? How do we bring it together?
There’s a full scope of issues that UNESCO should be doing, and I don’t mean to duplicate the work of other institutions. The OECD is producing the most incredible outlooks on science. That’s perfect. We are producing an amazing report every year on women in science. That’s our leading thing. Let’s cooperate among each other.
And then the other part is, how do we bring notions and publications that will change the way we think about things? I was enjoying my time in the Social and Human Sciences Sector because I would bring thought leaders who would propose the most incredible things that you wouldn’t even think.
We brought, for example, Hartmut Rosa, who is a philosopher, to deliver his speech on the new social energy. I have never, ever talked to a philosopher that way. I don’t even know if all the auditorium understood what he was saying. Let’s try to challenge ourselves in our knowledge, and I think UNESCO can really provide that platform to do it.
Zeng Yi, Professor, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Professor, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
No, I don’t really have a question, but to show my support and to review some of our collaborations, which I think are not only beneficial to myself, but also show what actually can be done by having a platform as UNESCO.
So I wanted to review a little bit about how we actually started the exploration of UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. It becomes a fight between me and Professor Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, which is truly interesting. The Secretariat wanted to initiate the discussion, and then they wanted me and Professor Emma Rutkamp to co-lead the basic fundamental values of ethics.
So we mailed each other. We never got any reply from each other. For the problems of internet connections, email trash, we never got any reply. And then I started doing some survey. People who were in the group were actually being in the surveys. And Professor Emma Ruttkamp said, “Hey Yi, how can you actually start a survey without me?” And then Professor Emma Ruttkamp was like, “I don’t want to work with this guy.” And for me, I was like, “Oh, she never replied to my email.” And then our common colleague, [inaudible] from the Ethics Committee, he was like, “So guys, what really happened?” And then I was like, “You never replied to my email,” and Emma was like, “Oh gosh, you never replied to my email, and you started everything.” So actually, it started with misunderstandings.
This is all about the world. The world is full of misunderstandings and unintended harm to each other, and then we will have to solve this. So the Secretariat began the exploration by solving a problem between us two. And then what really happened is that me and Emma co-chaired the working group, working very nicely, and I learned quite a lot from her. So the conclusion from the working group, which I like the most, is the principles of interconnectedness—living peacefully and in a just and interconnected world. This is a proposal from me and Emma all together.
So when I proposed “living in harmony among technology and humans,” everybody liked it. I remember one of the chiefs of the Secretariat, Dafna [Feinholz], was like, “Oh, this might be one of the non-Western values put into the UNESCO documentation,” which is perfect, because there are too many Western values, not so much about non-Western values.
And Emma was like, “I like it very much. It’s not only from China, Korea, and Japan—in general from Asia—but also deeply rooted in South Africa. When you talk about living in harmony, actually in Ubuntu, in South Africa, we’ve been talking about interconnectedness, we’ve been talking about individuals and the relationship to a greater whole. So we feel that it would be much, much better to add the value of interconnectedness together with living in harmony and peacefully.”
And then I remember, like last year, when we had the UNESCO Global Forum on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence 2024 to establish the AI Ethics Experts Without Borders network. Gabriela had two candidates working with her, so she selected one boy and one girl. The boy is me, and the girl is Emma. So now we’ve been very close friends. Now, for international travels, I always get emails from Emma. And she was like, “Will you attend this?” and I was like, “I’m in,” so she would participate. Last year, when I invited Emma to the World Internet Conference, a China-based international organisation, to actually participate in our AI safety and ethics programme, the guy gave too much work to Emma. And Emma said, “I quit. I cannot, you know, take this.“
And then I emailed Emma saying, “Can you just, you know, stay with the team, just to support me? I don’t give you a must-work. It’s all about your choice.” And Emma was like, “I’m only staying for you. This is the only reason why I can show my support.” So we become—you know, starting as two fighting with each other, and then to actually draw a conclusion of living in harmony and an interconnected world, and to support each other.
So I think this is something that I learned from the UNESCO training. And then Emma was like, “Yi, although we’re very different, I still wanted to collaborate with you.” And then I was like, “Can we just stop that ‘although we’re very different’, why do you think that we’re very different?” And then she was like, “Oh, because I’m from Africa, you’re from China. We have very different cultures.”
So this is true. When you apply for UNESCO World Heritage, you have to show the uniqueness of your cultural heritage; otherwise, you will not be named as a UNESCO World Heritage. And then I’m challenging the system by saying, “Can we also talk about the commonalities?” Of course, for all the World Heritages, we have differences. We have uniqueness. But it was the human culture, fundamental human values and cultures that interconnected us all together. So, by that, for UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, we’re recommending not only using AI to do World Heritage and cultural heritage, but also to use AI to promote cultural interactions.
So last but not least, I wanted to show my support by saying that, for the future of UNESCO and the relationship between UNESCO and China, China needs to—or to me—re-establish a more effective framework to collaborate with UNESCO. Now the contact point is at the Ministry of Education, but I would propose that we need a stronger institution to weave a network of collaborative ministries, let’s say, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs working together with the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, because UNESCO works for education, science, and culture. Now, the Ministry of Education mostly works for education. So I would propose that a better coordination mechanism from China could make it a stronger support for the UNESCO vision, so that many of the practices and actions from UNESCO can be grounded in this reality.
Well, I’m going to finalise my final words by saying, when you establish the ethics of neuroscience, I was asked by the Secretariat, saying, “So here are the candidates. Do you have, actually, any recommendations?” And I was like, “Find the one who is a neuroscientist by nature but is also very politically powerful so that he can help to do the implementation of these ethics of neuroscience.” Well, because I have just been exploring the ethics of AI training, I know that I need to be more powerful to do the implementation. So I think they adopted my recommendation to invite Professor Qingming Lou, who is the president of the University of Hainan and a top-tiered neuroscientist in AI.
So I think the Chinese government should give more support for the implementation of the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence as a starting point, but not only that. With this as a practical example, China could consider having a stronger institution, a much more effective collaborative way to not only interact with UNESCO, but really, as Gabriela said, UNESCO’s work is informing the member states what you should and should not do. And I think action-implementation is the key to the future, led by thought leadership from experts organised by UNESCO. Thank you.
Gabriela Ramos
I think that’s a beautiful reflection, because, as I said at the beginning, it’s all about people. It’s all about people challenging or working together. And I don’t know if there are other questions, but at the end, I have a comment on that.
CGTN
Thanks for the speech. I am a journalist from CGTN. I have a question for Ms. Ramos. UNESCO Strategy for the Digital Transformation of Education analyses the needs to prevent AI technology from exacerbating education inequality. And in the context of the popularisation of generative AI, how does UNESCO promote members states to establish a cross-cultural data governance framework? Thank you.
Gabriela Ramos
If we get the relationship between the technology and the educational systems right, I think that will be a huge success, because, in a smaller scale, it represents the whole of the impact of the AI in our world, in our lives.
But if you nail it down towards the education systems, there are these questions, as you say, first, how do we ensure that this is not only for the lucky few that are connected, who know how to use it, and who then can apply it to enhance their own capacities to learn? This is at an individual level. But then it’s the school system—professors, teachers, that might be able to be prepared to use it and to enhance the learning experience of kids or not, because they’re completely alien to any technological device.
And this is very interesting because again, the conversation should not be about the technology, because in my perspective, it would be wrong to ban technology in the school, like using generative AI. Why would you just ban it? I would actually frame it in a way that helps the students to perform certain tasks, as long as it’s transparent and it is declared and all of these things.
But the fact is that I still remember, at the OECD, we did a report looking at the countries that were introducing more technology in the classroom, and then comparing that to the student outcomes. And it seems that those who were introducing more technology were declining in their performance, because they were talking about the technology. They were not talking about the organisational changes that need to be put in place in the school systems to introduce the technology that they will need to develop for the purpose of that class. Because it’s not just to go to the market and use any technology. You need to develop content that is culturally aligned with the classroom. You need to use your own language, for example. You need to even use visuals that are appealing to the kids of the certain region or country.
And therefore again, it’s like when you introduce technologies to businesses. It’s not about technology. It’s about the changes inside—in the mindset of the leaders of the business, in the capacities of the workers, in the infrastructure that you need to put together.
And therefore, what we say about introducing technologies in education is about reforming education to use the technologies, because at the end you cannot—and this is the case—if you are trying to prepare the kids just to deal with generative, where generative is now the past. There will be something else. But what we need to teach them is adaptability, anticipation, is resilience—all of these elements that will help them to navigate a very rich technological environment without losing sight that what we’re doing is to enhance the learning process.
And then, to your point, the final issue—it’s not rocket science. If you have schools that are lagging behind, invest more in those schools. If you have countries that are lagging behind, invest more in those countries. So it’s not rocket science, but sometimes it looks like it’s very complicated. But a very good question. We have the guidelines for introducing AI in the classrooms. But again, it’s training teachers, preparing the school, doing the content, culturally aligned, etc.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Good, so probably we’re running out of time, but I think we had a very good discussion this afternoon.
We had Madam Gabriela Ramos—you know, she made a special trip to China. I know you’ve been here before, but this time in the capacity of Assistant Director-General, and also running for the future position of Director-General of UNESCO, this important organisation. You let us know your ideas, your experience, and, of course, your vision for the future of UNESCO, but also all the innovation and leading work you have done in the past.
I think this is really a great occasion for all of us to understand better your perspective and your insights. So this has really been a very good discussion. And then, also, we want to keep this as part of the “CCG Global Dialogues,” which has been running for the last five years—a dialogue with almost 100 global leaders, experts, and also politicians. So it’s really great.
So, probably, to conclude, I hope that you have some concluding remarks before Dr. Miao gives her appreciative thanks to you. So maybe we’ll give the final words to Madam Ramos, please.
Gabriela Ramos
No, I was actually reacting to what she mentioned, because beyond all of these challenges that we need to confront in terms of the technological transition, or the climate transition, or the demographic transition, of all these transitions, we humans are subject to a lot of transitions at the very same time.
But the fact is that we need new ideas. We need new ways of doing things. We need to detach from common wisdom that actually has not delivered great success in many areas—on the inequalities front, on the climate front.
And therefore, I feel that this exchange that you had with Emma—the question of interconnectedness, the question of harmony—and then you bring the harmony to the table, and the Western countries said, we don’t like that because it’s very Chinese. And then they come with something else, and the Southeast Asians don’t like that because it’s very Western. All of these things are what we know.
But I feel UNESCO in the future would have this capacity to really try to bring all this knowledge together in a way that helps us understand: how do we build a much better future? And I would really think about rethinking the economy because this is where things come from, because individual success is rewarded, because it’s competition, because it’s maximising my benefits over your benefits, because it’s the revenue and the profit—profit-driven technological developments.
And I think that we really need to change the incentives, to bring all of those dimensions that matter for people that are not very well accounted by our economic models or our decision-making models.
I was in Iceland with the Wellbeing Economy Forum, and I was really impressed. After COVID, one of the issues that we discovered is that humans are not only workers or consumers or producers. Humans are also people who like to relate to each other, and the way we dealt with COVID—trying to protect the body or protect the economy—dismissed all the spiritual, relational, societal. And this is causing really great pain to our young generation, which has a lot of mental health issues.
So I think we are at the moment where we need to find new ways of building our societies, our economies on the basis probably of ethics, probably of philosophy, probably of understanding—like the Ubuntu or the harmony that we are part of a greater goal, and also that we are community and not only individuals. And that probably the community’s success might not be the same as individual success. But there are a lot of reflections to be done, and I’m sure that UNESCO has a role to play in that. So thank you so much.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Great. Thank you. Perhaps, Dr Miao, you want to say a few final words of appreciation.
Mabel Lu MIAO, Co-founder and Secretary General, Center for China and Globalization (CCG)
Thank you, dear Madam Gabriela Ramos, and your wonderful speech about this very important topic. We know this topic is so significant, as it’s a future-driven topic and an open question to all human beings. For every individual, it’s so important. So, we highly appreciate what you said, and you brought a lot of stimulating new ideas to us. And also, we get together to understand this topic deeply.
And we thank all of our experts from different places for participating in today’s dialogue. And dear Gabriela Ramos, do you know this is a fantastic dialogue series? Henry conducted a lot of dialogues with people like Lawrence Summers, Joseph Nye, and many of those distinguished guests from different countries on global governance. But today I was so impressed by what you said about AI. That is a fantastic answer and an open question for everybody.
Again, I highly appreciate it, and thank you to all of you who participated in today’s “CCG Global Dialogue.” We are so honoured to have you again. Thank you all very much. And distinguished experts like Professor Zeng Yi and Wang Linghan from China, as they are also the great senior experts on this topic.
But CCG would like to engage more with UNESCO. This is a wonderful platform for the public good, not just about culture, civilisation, but also AI and new technology. It’s a great question and topic. We would like to continue discussing this further. Thank you all. Thank you.
