Predatory AI: how we can resist corporate capture of the human mind
Speakers
Chair
Drawing on his recent book, Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind, the second in his trilogy, Humanising the Future, Nick Couldry will reflect on whether humanity is entering into exactly the wrong social contract with AI: a contract based on ever greater dependence on business products, while ignoring the implications for environmental and social sustainability, and for the future of the human embodied mind.
Couldry will argue that a good future for humanity cannot mean trading away our cognitive resources and independence to corporations through predatory AI models whose terms we do not control. A good future with AI must mean putting social, community and planetary values first. Couldry imagines a different social contract with AI, and a different future from the one Big Tech imagines. He will survey the social damage currently being done by commercial AI at work, particularly in the education and creative sectors, when we accept the wrong social contract with AI. Couldry argues that the time to renegotiate our contract with AI is now, and the time to build strategies for resisting commercially-driven AI, is now!
Meet our speakers and chair
Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. As a sociologist, he approaches media and communications from the perspective of symbolic power historically concentrated in media institutions. His recent work focuses on data questions, ethics, politics, and the social implications of AI and Big Data. He has authored or edited 18 books and many journal articles and book chapters.
Gina Neff is a leading sociologist on the impact of technological advances in communication. She is Professor of Responsible AI at Queen Mary University of London and Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge – an independent research centre that aims to make digital technologies work for people, society, and the planet.
Alison Powell is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Alison’s work concerns knowledge politics in the context of social and ecological transition. Occupying disciplinary edges between communication studies, STS and social theory, Alison combines a focus on narrative and discourse with considerations of material politics, intervening in both through a range of empirical and creative work.
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