Nick Couldry is Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow at LSE and a Fellow of the British Academy. His work has moved from the symbolic power of media to the ethics and politics of big data and AI. He co-founded the Tierra Común network on data colonialism and is the author of The Cost of Connection, Data Grab and The Space of the World. His new book, Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind, is published on 13 November. Available here: Order Now

Andrew and Nick talk about why Nick believes we made a "category error" with social media by delegating the design of social space to profit-driven business, and why he thinks we are repeating a more complicated version of that mistake with AI. They cover the philosophical dispute between Descartes and Spinoza over embodied intelligence, data colonialism and the idea of "coloniality," Anthropic's claims about AI welfare and consciousness, and what Nick calls substitutive AI, where a predictive model quietly replaces something that should stay human.

Guest: Professor Nick Couldry, Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow at LSE, Fellow of the British Academy

https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/nick-couldry

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-couldry-1b22b1354/

Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap