Predatory AI: A Keynote Lecture by Professor Nick Couldry

Professor Nick Couldry (LSE) will be discussing his new book Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind

An event co-hosted by the UCD Centre for Digital Policy and Research Ireland ADAPT Centre at Trinity College Dublin, as part of the Horizon Europe project Forsee, https://forseeproject.eu/, funded by the framework of the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement Nº 101177579.

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Professor Nick Couldry will present his new book and open up a discussion on AI and the future of humanity and our planet.

From the publishers' (Polity Press) site:

"We are told that AI is inevitable, a revolutionary next stage in planetary intelligence. The calculative power that Big Tech is harnessing via its AI products cannot be doubted. But what if humanity is entering into the wrong social contract with AI?

A good future for humanity cannot mean inputting our lives into predatory AI models whose terms we don't control. It cannot mean trading away our own cognitive resources – and the power to define the future direction of the human mind – to corporations. It cannot mean ever greater cognitive dependence on business products, while ignoring the implications for environmental sustainability.

A good future with AI must mean putting social, community and planetary values first. This book imagines a different social contract with AI, and a different future. It presents clearly the social damage currently being done at work, and particularly the education and creative sectors, by accepting the wrong social contract with AI. And it debunks the philosophical prejudices that block us from valuing our own human cognitive resources.

In this second book of his trilogy, Humanising the Future, Nick Couldry argues that the time to renegotiate our contract with AI is now. This book opens a path to doing so."

Bio: Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and since 2017 a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of eighteen books including The Costs of Connection (with Ulises Mejias, Stanford University Press, 2019), The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), and Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012). His latest books are Predatory AI: How We can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind (Polity, November 2026), The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? (Polity, 2024) and Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (Chicago University Press 2024, with Ulises Mejias). Nick is also the co-founder of the Tierra Común network of scholars and activists (https://www.tierracomun.net/ ).