Published in the Peace magazine, Canada, October 2025
Having worked for a decade as a visual storyteller and a campaigner for social and climate justice, I found myself at a point of transition, where the old systems of communications were transforming through social networks, ubiquitous digital technologies were blossoming and the voice of citizens taking a much bigger stage in an increasingly connected world. And in a world increasingly threatened by climate change, and environmental degradation. What does the future of storytelling look like? In the middle of my filmmaking adventures, I stumbled across an experience in a virtual reality (VR) headset that, quite literally, opened my eyes to the possibilities. Fittingly, it was an adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, created by Mika Johnson, my tutor and mentor, and was a project that brought the surreal world of Gregor Samsa, from the story to life.
Virtual Reality, like many technologies, has its roots in the military and was used for simulations such as the Link Trainer, which is a head mounted device with two screens and a control system that simulates airplane controls, which was used in World War II to train pilots quicker1. However, it quickly grew and while there were smaller scale models used for entertainment, as a technology it blossomed in the 2000s, with award winning work by artists such as Nonny de la Peña using it to bring people to an understanding of the horrors of war, poverty and violence.
In 2023, the technology had progressed to the point that we could use it in new and exciting ways, and that translated to Whale Fall -- an interactive Virtual Reality experience that takes the participants to the depths of the ocean, where they can see a whale, trapped in a discarded fishing net, surrounded by plastic, fall to the ocean surface, and then the participant can move around the whale in VR and collect the trash to allow the whale to decompose and the ecosystem to bloom. The Whale Fall project was developed by Riya Mahajan, Armelle Mihailescu, Selin Öztürk and me, four students of the Royal College of Art in London. We were lucky to have the Whale and Dolphin Conservation join us as a partner for help with the research, and to get support from Ocean Alliance which shared with us their entire library of whale songs going back to the 1970s and done by the legendary Roger Payne.
Since we developed the project, it has been showcased to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, seen through a Virtual Reality headset that makes VR work. How is it different from watching something on a screen? It comes from a few unique strengths - the power of digital embodiment, and place and plausibility illusion. Quite simply, VR can teleport the audience, letting them really think and feel like they are in a new place. This makes VR over 70% higher in retention and up to 40% higher in emotional impact, which is crucial for engaging people worldwide in an immediate realization of the effects of ocean pollution, beyond merely telling the story. We witnessed the effectiveness for ourselves when some of our audiences got back to us, and told us they had stopped using plastic straws because they were affected by seeing the plastic floating deep in the ocean “with their own eyes.”
Our journey continues now, and we are in the process of expanding our idea into the “Deep Dive XR” initiative, which harnesses the power of eXtended Reality technologies (VR, AR, Mixed Reality, Immersive Films) for climate education. This allows the audience to be able to fly as a bird, burrow in the ground, witness the world through the eyes of an ant (or an elephant), all within the dimensions of the headset. XR opens up a universe of possibilities, and our initiative has been recognised for its potential through the Terra Carta Design Lab, led by King Charles and Sir Jony Ive (of iPhone design fame), with the Sustainable Markets Initiative. Through this initiative we seek to reach across the world, and bring the power of XR to secondary and higher education globally. The goal is to bring scientific thought with intuitive creativity to make learning seamless and powerful. DeepDive XR can be seen at the Terra Carta Design Lab
The technology is an interesting challenge as we move ahead. With its widespread adoption, the key here is to determine who creates in this space, what they promote, what the safeguards are, and how it can be used wisely. We are just discovering the incredible and vast new world of eXtended Reality, with the hope and intent of shaping the future into a brighter version of what it is today. And connecting us in an immediate way to the environment around us, and its endangerment, which we can no longer afford to ignore.
Since the arrival of the computational era from the 1990s, technology has moved at an exponential pace, transforming research, communications, social and personal relationships, as well as data analytics, surveillance, military applications, economic and political warfare. Modern computational technologies have been a double-edged sword, with the potential to undermine democracy itself, and while there have been marked improvements in the efficacy of the grassroots sector, the issues of poverty, discrimination, social exclusion, climate crisis and especially disparity (both sociopolitical and economic) have been exacerbated.
The challenge isn’t just access - but ethical use. Applied responsibly, technology can empower the world’s most disadvantaged. The Jai Jagat (“Victory to the World”) movement highlights four pillars for peace-building—eradicating poverty, eliminating social exclusion, halting conflict and violence, and mitigating the climate crisis. Emerging technologies, grounded in these ideals, can help accelerate each goal through access to knowledge, resources and data analytics.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Neural Networks and Language Models
Platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini generate responses via predictive word-association models, and their potential is significantly more than being just enhanced search engines. Imagine a custom GPT trained on the writings of Gandhi, MLK, Addams, Thoreau, Mandela, von Suttner and others—enabling users to explore moral dilemmas through the lens of nonviolent thought. A GPT trained on this knowledge base can dive into the texts and explore new perspectives, intersectionalities and possibilities.
AI use in data analytics can enable NGOs to train our own AI model on the data related to land, people, poverty, income households, food produce, seeds and other localised pieces of data related to the organisations’ work. AI can also help us find the key stakeholder organisations and individuals for a campaign we want to run, even bring us their publicly available contact details and social profiles, and help us explore alternate approaches for the campaigns.
Some other ambitious possibilities could include AI-driven micro-credit allocation, factoring climate risks and land rights into community-level financial models, AI moderators that can ensure balanced participation in large multilingual town halls (real-time translation + fairness checks), “Conflict early-warning dashboards” combining weather data, land disputes, hate speech patterns and “Guardian” systems that automatically flag illegal deforestation or land grabs in near real-time through AI and data analytics.
Data Analytics
A good approach to technology is to consider its use by a thinker whose principles align with ours. Mahatma Gandhi might have asked - ‘how does this help the poorest and most excluded people in the world?’ Data can make this principle actionable. Mapping disparities in land ownership, gender, education, food, water, shelter and healthcare enables organisations to focus interventions where they are needed most.
Soil analysis can help to build regenerative practices, expedite identification of local crops and help build more sustainable, resilient ecosystems. Platforms like Land Matrix, LANDex, and the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch already aggregate open data at scale. NGOs could build interactive dashboards to visualise exclusion across social groups (such as indigenous, women, migrants), or couple local data with global climate models to forecast resilience strategies.
eXtended Reality (Virtual and Augmented Reality)
Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies have introduced a new paradigm for interacting with the world, allowing people to
Virtual reality can be an “empathy machine.” Projects like BeAnotherLab allow users to “swap bodies” with storytellers, hearing their narratives from a first-person perspective. My own VR project Whale Fall, which immerses audiences in the ocean’s depths to witness the impact of plastic pollution, has reached tens of thousands worldwide. Our audience feedback suggests that the impact of witnessing ocean pollution while being transported to the bottom of the ocean has been much more impactful, and embodied experiences shift awareness into action more effectively than statistics alone.
Similarly, Clouds Over Sidra places viewers inside a Syrian refugee camp, fostering empathy and solidarity. Immersive technologies can bridge divides by allowing people to experience lives other than their own.
Robotics, Drones & Intelligent Embodiment
Robotics pose risks: unchecked automation can massively displace labour, and combined with surveillance, private unmanned armies and autonomous weapons, concentrate power dangerously. In the hands of ethical leadership, however, these embodied technologies can be transformative for the human population.
Robots already perform hazardous factory work, such as handling toxic minerals or heavy lifting. We will see more and more of these technologies explore earth in areas such as mining, and can improve worker safety. These technologies combined with artificial intelligences have incredible potential to track land health and help deploy seeds en masse, helping with reforestation and regeneration of territories. Drones are extremely useful in deployment and supply of relief in disaster-affected areas, and can also be used for wildlife protection and conservation, identifying and helping delineate areas of land that should be protected and reserved for indigenous communities, and monitoring forest health and the quality of air, water and other resources.
Today, many of these technologies are available across the world, and the cost of acquiring the technology has been greatly democratised. However, technology alone cannot guarantee peace. The decisive factor is leadership rooted in moral values, cooperation, and inclusivity. If guided by principles of ahimsa—nonviolence, justice, and mutual wellbeing—these tools can help create a fairer world. Without such safeguards, they risk amplifying the inequalities and conflicts they might otherwise resolve.
This Earth has enough for every man’s need but not enough for one man’s greed
- Mahatma Gandhi
Bibliography, References & Further Reading
Lange, Christian, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (1921)
Gandhi, Mohandas K., Hind Swaraj (1909)
King, Martin Luther Jr., Nobel Lecture (1964)
Addams, Jane, Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922)
von Suttner, Bertha, Lay Down Your Arms (1889)
Landex – Global Land Governance Index and tools
BeAnotherLab[8], The Machine to Be Another
Gandhi on appropriate technology, Young India (1925)
Geneva Peace Week — technology as a catalyst for peacebuilding
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2019).
United Nations, ‘World Social Report 2020: Inequality in a Rapidly Changing World’, UN DESA (2020).
Jai Jagat International, ‘Manifesto’, Jai Jagat 2020 <https://www.jaijagat2020.org/>.
OpenAI, ‘GPT-4 Technical Report’, arXiv:2303.08774 (2023).
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics (London: Penguin, 2011).
Land Matrix Initiative <https://landmatrix.org/>.
World Resources Institute, ‘Global Forest Watch’ <https://www.globalforestwatch.org/>.
BBC - Future of Conservation through VR <https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250306-the-future-of-conservation-might-be-in-vr-headsets>
Whale Fall Project <whalefallproject.com>
BeAnotherLab, ‘The Machine to Be Another’ <http://beanotherlab.org/>.
United Nations, ‘Clouds Over Sidra’ (2015) <https://vrse.works/projects/clouds-over-sidra/>.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014).
International Federation of Red Cross, ‘Drones for Humanitarian Aid’ (2020).
Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright, Blockchain and the Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Mahatma Gandhi, Trusteeship (https://www.mkgandhi.org/trusteeship/chap01.php)
Note: Chat GPT (GPT 5.0) has been used to co-author the article, and has provided suggestions for the speculative possibilities of AI use in peace building.