Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence?

Fear of artificial intelligence is everywhere, and it is less understood than pronounced. Data centres are protested, chatbots are going rogue, and every fresh wave of synthetic word and image is met with the same reflexive alarm – yet the more loudly AI is feared, the less clearly it is seen. What if the fear itself is the symptom to be diagnosed, rather than the conclusion to be reached?

The title stakes a claim within a small but telling genealogy. Since Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, the ‘who’s afraid’ worked in two registers – first as a polemic in Derrida’s work on the university, and later in Butler’s writing on gender – asking not whether the fear is justified but what it does: whose authority it shields, whose it exposes. This lecture works in both registers. It is not interested in talking anyone out of their critique of AI, only in asking what that fear already knows.

Drawing on their book The Birth of Sensory Power (2026), the lecture offers what the current panic largely lacks: a genealogy. Rather than treating AI as a sudden invention, the book traces it as the latest configuration in a much older history of power, knowledge, and capital acting on the sensory apparatus – a history in which ’artificial intelligence’ is less an invention than an inheritance. Read this way, today’s anxieties turn out to be diagnostic instruments, revealing, often more precisely than their targets intend, exactly what kind of power is being exercised.

Meet our speakers and chair

Engin Isin, Professor Emeritus in International Politics, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. Engin was a professor of social science (1996-2002) and Canada Research Chair (2002-2006) at York University, a professor of politics at The Open University (2007-2016), and a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London (2017-2022).

Engin has written, spoken, and taught both on subjectivity, performativity, enactments and movements that emancipate peoples and on how cities, states, and empires accumulate subject peoples by dispossession, colonisation, and assimilation. Engin has undertaken historical and sociological studies of British imperial and colonial practices in Africa, America, Canada, Asia and Middle East, Ottoman imperial and colonial practices in Europe and Middle East and North Africa and French colonialism in Quebec, Haiti, and Algeria. Engin has also written about data empires of the 21st century.

The driving force in all these studies has been the struggle between imperial, colonial or national designs for conduct of people and how people subvert these designs by performative acts and invent political subjectivities. Engin’s work always asks how people make themselves subjects of politics through acts, movements, and struggles and explores the tension between emancipatory possibilities of citizenship and citizenship as an institution of domination.

Sara Salem, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, and global histories of anticolonialism.

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