Join us for the first event of the new Library Talks series at Rosemary Murray Library.

Dr Rachel Adams will deliver the talk, which will be followed up by a Q&A with Alberto Garcia Jr, Librarian at Rosemary Murray Library, and the audience.

AI is often presented as a technology with the potential to democratise knowledge, expand opportunity and transform lives. But what if the development of AI is instead reproducing - and in some cases deepening - long-standing inequalities in the global economy?

Drawing on my book The New Empire of AI, Rachel Adams examines the hidden structures of power behind the AI revolution: who builds AI, whose labour make it possible, who captures its value, and who pays the price.

From the workers who label the data underpinning AI systems to the concentration of computing power and capital in a handful of companies and countries, the talk explores how AI is being built upon profoundly unequal foundations. It asks what these inequalities mean for countries and communities outside the traditional centres of technological power, and whether the rapid diffusion of AI risks creating new forms of economic dependency and technological empire.

But this is not an argument that inequality is an inevitable consequence of AI. Rather, we will explore the more important question: under what conditions could AI become a force for greater justice rather than greater inequality? And what choices - by governments, companies and societies - would be required to make that alternative future possible?

Description supplied by the event organiser.