We are excited to share that Nick Couldry (London School of Economics and Political Science) will join us as keynote speakers at DHNB2027! More keynote speakers will be announced shortly on this page.
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory Emeritus 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 Data Grab, Chicago University Press 2024, and The Costs of Connection, Stanford University Press 2019 (both with Ulises Mejias), The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), and Media, Society, World (Polity 2012). His latest books are The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? (Polity, 2024) and Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind (Polity, mid November 2026). Nick is a co-founder of the Tierra Común network of scholars and activists (https://www.tierracomun.net/ ), ICA Fellow, Fellow of the British Academy, and recipient of the 2025 Dallas Smythe Award from the Union of Democratic Communications.
Title: “Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind”
Abstract: “Drawing on the author’s new book, Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind (Polity), this lecture will challenge grand hopes for how AI will expand the global economy and transform human potential to ask what AI is sociologically. The lecturewill consider the impacts of today’s emerging social contract with AI for workplaces, education, and creativity, and the potential impacts of widespread AI adoption on the institutional fabric of capitalist societies. As societies, we may be entering into completely the wrong social contract with AI, but why? One reason is a major contradiction within capitalism which always requires AI’s use for economic ends, so blinding us to the social costs, however high. Another reason is that, for four centuries since Descartes, we have tended to overvalue disembodied intelligence and undervalue our own embodied intelligence: as a result, we find it difficult to ‘answer back’ when business forces tell us we must adapt to a commercially driven AI future that is already written. The lecture will end by considering how we can develop a new philosophical and social perspective on AI, and so confront one of the greatest social challenges of our time: how to develop AI for social good, not in a ‘predatory’ way, but in the most productive way for society.”
Read more: https://www.nickcouldry.org/