By JoAnne Wadsworth, Communications Consultant, G20 Interfaith Forum
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On July 9, 2026, the G20 Interfaith Forum, in cooperation with the International Academy for Multicultural Cooperation, held a webinar entitled “AI and the Planet” — the fourth event in an eight-part series examining artificial intelligence and its intersection with many aspects of our lives. Speakers included John C. Havens, Founding Executive Director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, whose work helped shape AI-ethics standards drawn on by the OECD, UNESCO, and in the development of the EU AI Act, and author of Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximize Machines; David Korten, author of the international bestseller When Corporations Rule the World, former Harvard Business School faculty member, founder and president of the Living Economies Forum, and a leading advocate for a transition to what he calls an “Ecological Civilization”; and Arthur Lyon Dahl, President of the International Environment Forum, a Bahá’í-inspired sustainability organization, and a retired senior official of the UN Environment Programme with more than five decades in environmental science, assessment, and governance. Audrey E. Kitagawa, J.D., Founder and President of the International Academy for Multicultural Cooperation and Chair of the G20 Interfaith Forum Anti-Racism Initiative, moderated the discussion.
Audrey Kitagawa opened by noting the United Nations AI panel’s recent warning that AI is advancing faster than the world’s ability to measure or govern it. AI is already affecting the environment, she said: data centers consume vast amounts of energy and water, and the minerals required for semiconductors are extracted at the cost of erosion, pollution, and ecosystem destruction. She offered the Earth Charter as a framework, then invited each panelist to speak.
John C. Havens
Havens traced his path into AI ethics to a search, begun in 2012, for a code of ethics that did not yet exist. It convinced him that people and the planet must be prioritized at the outset of design and throughout a system’s life cycle — a conviction that shaped his work at IEEE, where he was founding chair of the IEEE 7000 standards series on applied ethics. The through-line, he said, is measurement: traditional metrics of success cannot help creators avoid unintended consequences, and organizations risk harm whenever human well-being and ecological sustainability are absent from their planning.
His current program, Planet Positive 2030, is built on what he called the regenerative imperative — mirroring the Earth’s natural systems and acting as stewards of what Saint Francis called our common home. Humans cannot flourish, he emphasized, if the planet is not flourishing. On water, he argued that the debate over hyperscale data centers has fixated on consumption per prompt while ignoring a prior question: how much water exists in the bioregions where these facilities are going up, many already water scarce.
“You don’t need Gen AI to find out how much water Gen AI uses. There are deep learning techniques using satellite imagery for water depletion and aquifers.”
He closed by noting that John McCarthy described “artificial intelligence” as a marketing term coined to fund the 1956 Dartmouth conference, and that its inherited measure of intelligence assumes our humanity resides in the brain alone — where Ubuntu ethics and many Indigenous traditions hold that I am because we are.
John’s views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or opinions of his employer.
David Korten
Korten began not with AI but with the larger challenge confronting humanity. Human beings are living creatures born of a living Earth, yet economies are organized to maximize financial returns to the already rich, consuming Earth’s living capital faster than it can regenerate in order to grow numbers that have no meaning outside the human mind. The defining challenge, he said, is not economic growth but civilizational transformation — the transition to an ecological civilization.
He prefers to think of AI as augmented intelligence, since its highest purpose is to expand humanity’s capacity to learn together rather than to replace human intelligence. But why, he asked, invest trillions of dollars and enormous quantities of energy, water, land, minerals, and human talent in expanding AI capacity before deciding what purposes justify consuming them — particularly when the applications now attracting investment are advertising, consumer manipulation, political surveillance, financial speculation, and military weaponry? Until that is addressed, he argued, there should be a moratorium on the expansion of AI infrastructure. AI cannot choose its own purpose, he added; it can only pursue the purposes embodied in the institutions that create, own, and govern it.
“The question before us is not whether AI will become wiser than humans. It is whether humans will become wise enough to govern AI in service to life rather than to money.”
Language, writing, science, and the internet make up what Korten called humanity’s information commons — a shared inheritance AI draws from, yet control over it is concentrating in a handful of corporations obliged to maximize returns to private investors. Humanity’s collective intelligence, he warned, could become the most destructive enclosure of the commons yet. A moratorium would not halt progress, he stressed, but create space for the conversation about purpose that AI’s developers have largely avoided.
Arthur Lyon Dahl
Dahl posed two further questions: what role should technology play in determining our future, and should the motivation for developing AI be private profit or the public good? As an environmental scientist specializing in complex systems and a member of the Bahá’í Faith, he sees technology as a tool whose proper use is a social question that should not be left to developers with narrow interests. AI can help monitor our planetary predicament, but something more is needed to create the political will to act on the good intentions already written into so many environmental agreements. The materialistic view of consciousness behind AI, he argued, ignores what every faith tradition affirms — that human beings have a spiritual dimension beyond their physical and intellectual capacities.
“Can we leave our spiritual growth to AI? AI could be taught to recite prayers for us, but what good would that do? AI has no soul.”
He warned that AI magnifies the reach of social media designed to be addictive and to reinforce confirmation bias, giving it power to manipulate beliefs and emotions for political, ideological, or commercial ends. Just as nuclear science produced both nuclear power and atomic bombs, AI can open new perspectives for civilization or trap us as passive consumers — both outcomes requiring strengthened global governance. Competition to win the infrastructure race, he added, threatens to duplicate capacity, multiply environmental impacts, and generate electronic waste the world cannot cope with.
He named the positive potential as well: remote sensing now reveals more about the Earth system than he could learn by visiting coral reefs at the start of his career six decades ago, and AI can extract far more meaning from that imagery. But there is no technological fix for the environmental crisis, he concluded. The real solution is to preserve, restore, and regenerate what nature has evolved over millions of years, under governance whose aim is public service rather than private profit.
Question and Answer Session
Why is it important to use the term “AI systems” rather than “artificial intelligence”?
John C. Havens explained that nearly all AI systems are built on human or environmental data, and that where personal data governance is absent, so is human agency. What most of society now calls AI is really generative AI, a framing that took hold after ChatGPT’s release in November 2022. The term AI systems reminds people that data governance matters, and that older techniques — those used for coral reef and medical imaging — deliver real insight without the energy and water demands of generative AI.
What question would you ask AI now for our common good and to save our environment?
David Korten responded that the questions humans ask AI are almost always framed around human well-being, while a larger one goes unaddressed: what is the purpose of creation, and what is our purpose within it? The purpose of AI, he suggested, is to support humans in fulfilling that deeper purpose — and until that is sorted out, we are not in a position to assign AI’s purposes at all.
What is keeping human wisdom from surfacing to put values and ethics first?
Arthur Lyon Dahl suggested that generative AI is built on the wisdom of the past and cannot look to the wisdom of the future, nor reach the higher purposes faith traditions teach — turning the other cheek, forgiving, being humble. AI can duplicate the language, he said, but not the fundamental purpose. Drawing on his coral reef work, he noted that complexity scales through integration, cooperation, and symbiosis — something AI cannot predict in advance.
Concluding Remarks
Invited to offer closing thoughts, Havens described the strangeness of moving between conversations about AI approaching consciousness and evenings spent sitting in the dark after recent floods knocked out power near his New Jersey home. What exists in those moments, he said, are other people and the planet. He returned to caregiving as the measure of any technology, and to water as the thing to prioritize above all — a resource nearly every major faith tradition honors.
Korten said that the deeper our understanding of creation grows, the more it reveals interdependence: the human body is comprised of tens of trillions of cells self-organizing to maintain the vessel of our consciousness. Human institutions organize from the top down, he observed, while every aspect of creation unfolds from the bottom up. He finds AI a tremendous tool for bringing that interdependence into consciousness — though it depends entirely on the questions we ask.
Dahl cautioned that too much faith is placed in technology because the economic system profits from building it, and that humanity has moved to a global system without the institutions needed to manage it.
Kitagawa thanked the panelists and closed by underscoring the theme running through all three presentations: that we exist in interdependent relationships with all of life, and that our wisdom and knowledge are indelibly shaped by those relationships.
“Whatever the future holds, we must be equipped to navigate the landscape fully awake and guided by our highest principles, values, and conscience.”
She invited participants to join the next webinar in the series the following Thursday, July 16, on AI and peacebuilding.
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JoAnne Wadsworth is a Communications Consultant for the G20 Interfaith Forum Association and Editor of the Viewpoints Blog, IF20’s platform for commentary at the intersection of faith and global policy. She has covered the work of the Forum across multiple G20 cycles, producing summaries, articles, and editorial content that bring the voices of interfaith leaders and scholars to a broader audience. Her writing engages with topics spanning environmental governance, religious freedom, anti-racism, and the role of faith in multilateral policy processes. She is based in the United States.