Interview – Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS University of London. He has held several honorary positions, including as a Senior Member of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, where he finished his MPhil and PhD, and the first Jarvis Doctorow Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. In addition, he is the inaugural Co-Director of the SOAS Centre for AI Futures. His newest book, The Myth of Good AI: A Manifesto for Critical Artificial Intelligence (2025 Manchester University Press) challenges dominant narratives about artificial intelligence from a global thought perspective and calls for justice-oriented, globally inclusive approaches to technology. It serves as the foundational text for 'critical Artificial Intelligence'. This is the author's fourth interview with E-International Relations, and the most recent prior interview was published in 2025.
E-International Relations is free to read on our website and on substack. We rely on reader support to make this possible.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
Our research team at SOAS, in particular my PhD students, work on incredibly exciting research themes all the time. We are exploring how AI systems affect marginalised communities; how the ideology of tech-leaders such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others determines our everyday exposure to technology and how their techno-ideology undernmines our security. Then there are various other flashpoints of the world, that we focus on: Palestine, Iran, US foreign policies, power, resistance, torture sites, data centres etc.
I should say that as a philosopher, I dwell on anything that has to do with the human experience. So I have ceased to define that vast space as a “field”. I do think we have lost the ability, partially due to the modern university systems, to think and speak beyond disciplinary boundaries. Therefore, we travel from critical theory, technology studies, from there to Persia, back to Jung, Adorno and Foucault and then to Farabi and Ibn-Sina. This is an itinerary inscribed into the Chair that was created for me at SOAS: the first professorship in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies. But it is also a part of my everyday intellectual self-development. This process of constant and consistent discovery opens up magnificent spaces of inquiry that never existed with rigid disciplinary boundaries and they are as generic as it gets. Colleagues keep asking me: what is your field of specialisation? I guess the political, psychological and socio-economic experience of humans and that of our post-human AI companions captures it best. When it comes to AI, the most important movements that I see are captured in a language of protest and resistance against the so-called tech-giants and their governmental enablers. The violence of their techno-politics has been the topic of my last two books. Today, I am thinking about how these AI-technologies determine our understanding of space – from our inner selves to the universe. So that is my current “field”.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
Incredibly radical changes keep happening within a consistent frame of mind that is affected, if not constituted by my personal experiences, education, socialisation etc. The shifts are massive. They are like euphoric shocks that one gets used to – a very healthy form of intoxication with blissful eureka moments that one can only indulge in via intellectual enquiry. So given that these eureka moments keep occurring, one tends to become cautious about grand theories that explain everything. In fact, I have found myself debunking the enlightenment myth that we can understand the world and humans easily. No – knowledge is tough, theory mostly fails unless it is tempered by a disciplined and critical mind.
Alas, these days the scrolling/dead mindset rules supreme. The mass delusion thus effected has been manufactured as a very deliberate system to govern the masses through technological domination. For me all of this is a source of motivation as we are even more tasked to hold up the merits of criticism and resistance in the name of a better, more tolerant life for everyone. We live in the most de-intellectualised era of recent human history after all. Dumb money rules, stupidity is celebrated, knowledge is discarded as noise. This constellation during the age of Artificial Intelligence, when our very existence as a human species is challenged, is particularly dangerous even on an existential level.
Debates around artificial intelligence, and how it shapes our social reality, is a hot topic at present. How does this manifest as the “social and political delirium” that you speak of in your book?
I have conceptualised delirium as a system where society is continuously psycho-codified to accept a perfectly staged untruth about every aspect of our life. This is a pseudo-reality that is accepted as the truth. Driven by the "good AI" lobby, this delirium blurs the lines between reality and hyper-engineered corporate illusions. It manipulates basic human vulnerabilities — specifically fear — to weaponise power and maximise corporate profit.
So with every click on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok or Instagram, we experience an artificial high over lofty technological promises. This illusion obscures severe systemic issues like global inequality, labour exploitation, and climate disasters. Furthermore, delirium feeds on human instinct. Algorithms use artificial hallucinations and perceived threats to trigger fight-or-flight responses. This keeps individuals compliant, anxious, and deeply dependent on tech solutions. In this way human beings are reduced to what I called "undead canvases". We lose our subjective selfhood as big-tech systems lodge their logic directly into our neural architecture. By recognising this system as a form of sado-masochistic domination, much akin to a master-slave dialetic in the non-Hegelian sense, this delirium is a post-modern technique of bio-power that is minute. By recognising it as such, we can cleanse ourselves from its nefarious impacts by various forms of self-growth that I indicate in the book too: from meditative self-education to forms of community-based collective resistance. All of those actions help us to stay awake and to alert others. Even if it is just one friend, partner or family member. It is worth the effort!
How can alternative AI imaginaries counter hegemonic systems of power?
This is happening every day as a part of a growing, globally organised AI resistance movement. Alternative AI imaginaries counter hegemonic systems of power by completely shifting the purpose of artificial intelligence from top-down corporate control to bottom-up, community-driven social emancipation. Instead of viewing AI as an inevitable instrument for automated profit and warfare, these alternative visions rewrite the algorithm's foundational logic to break the corporate-state monopoly on technology. This disruption begins by enabling a form of "emancipative AI" where data systems are treated as tools for grassroots mobilisation and techno-resistance, allowing communities to turn the tables on big tech just as early social media was repurposed for democratic movements. For instance, I have cultivated a "Che AI" with a set of commands that educate it to think in terms of resistance and civil action. Do you have such an AI resistance fighter? If not, then it is about time as he/she/it is a great source for the most wonderful "data pollution". If there are millions of resistance AIs out there LLM’s will be socialised with their logic providing a healthy antidote to the "Nazi AIs" that the extremists foster in their laboratories.
This everday techno-resistance rooted in possible alternative imaginaries actively decolonise the data-codes by dismantling techno-imperialism, which historically extracted data from vulnerable populations. By replacing rigid, centred coding structures with global, multi-civilisational perspectives, these new frameworks prevent machines from reproducing systemic racism and historical biases. To ensure this shift lasts, I have advocated for a "GoodThink" approach that injects humanist values directly into machine learning architecture, deliberately infusing coding languages with notions of love, hope, and collective human security instead of cold mathematical optimisation that the likes of Altman, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg etc. favour. Finally, these alternative visions cultivate a critical transversality that breaks the conformist, one-dimensional monoculture fed to us by corporate power. By blending art, comparative philosophy, and critical theory, alternative imaginaries shake society out of its tech-induced delirium, serving as a powerful reminder that our current corporate-dominated trajectory is not a permanent law of nature, but a highly reversible political choice. Fight Muskim, I say, and do it every day for the sake of the planet.
You warn that AI may pose a risk to human security. What are the main ways in which AI might be mobilised against humans?
Ultimately, there are the three ways that I have been teaching critical AI at SOAS University of London, especially in the postgraduate course “AI and Human Security” which we created as the first of its kind in the United Kingdom and beyond: we are studying how humanity is fighting a silent, invisible war for its very soul, as a powerful corporate-state alliance unleashes a terrifying triad of technological forces that are systematically challenging human security.
The first of these invisible executioners we call microbial surveillance, a formless and omnipotent digital fog that floats undetected through our smart cities, personal devices, AI appliances and toys. Unlike the visible police states of the past, this surveillance behaves like an airborne pathogen, tracking every micro-movement, logging every habit, and converting the entirety of human existence into raw data for corporate profit. You cannot see it, you cannot hide from it, and it never sleeps.
Working hand-in-hand with this invisible eye is psycho-codification, the ultimate hacking of the human mind. Algorithms no longer merely predict human behaviour; they aggressively rewrite who we are by systematically programming our thoughts, fears, and deepest desires. By lodging corporate logic directly into our neural architecture, big tech tries to turn us into compliant puppets who actively crave their own digital cages.
This terrifying trajectory reaches its ultimate, cold materialisation in posthuman warfare, where the decision to kill is completely outsourced to machines and algorithms. Operating entirely beyond the reach of human empathy, international law, or ethical restraint, these autonomous weapons turn warfare into a calculated mathematical equation where human life is reduced to nothing more than an erased line of code.
The collision of these three forces threatens to inflict a fatal blow to human security, leaving us entirely exposed and defenceless. We are stripped of our mental sovereignty as our minds are colonised by code, and we are robbed of our bodily autonomy, tracked like livestock by an omnipresent digital eye. Ultimately, we face a future governed by automated violence, where life-and-death choices are dictated by soulless machines. By weaponising our deepest fears, this techno-delirium transforms humanity into a collection of what I earlier called "undead canvases" — breathing, but completely drained of freedom, privacy, and soul.
There is the belief that AI will be able to further human enhancement, improving our overall cognition and quality of life. How might the emergence of artificial intelligence alter the nature of the human condition?
As it stands, some of the lofty goals proclaimed are convenient marketing ploys to generate investment. It is not that AI does not promise amazing things in all field of human endeavour, even in the most sensitive areas such as medicine and psychology. But as of now, the manual is in the wrong hands. We can’t trust Musk and Co. They want profit and they don’t have the intellectual acumen or human empathy to be trusted. Musk, in particular, has turned into a right-wing agitator with extremely unhinged attitudes. We know about Gates and Epstein, so there is a legitimate case to be made here that the AI engine is driven by a bunch of blinkered specialists. That said, we are monitoring some of the advances into absolute cognitive mastery. Silicon Valley aggressively pitches the illusion that merging machine intelligence with neuroscience will finally unlock the nature of dreams and consciousness. I think we humans will compete well on that front, as opposed to AI advances in fields where the human mind is marginal to executive function.
The second core promise that we are monitoring with scepticism guarantees a future of utopian human security and frictionless living. Corporate tech lobbies promise revolutionary medical breakthroughs, claiming hyper-optimised data tracking will yield near-instantaneous drug discoveries and eradicate human disease. Alongside these medical miracles, the public is promised "smart cities" that leverage automated resource management to build safe, perfectly efficient urban environments. Ultimately, the tech sector promises to replace human judgment with infallible, mathematically precise calculations, eliminating human error across every major industry. Ironically, then, in this system of perfectionist sameness, clearly an effect of the obsessive-compulsive disorder of many tech giants, the most imperfect humans will be the most authentic. Imperfection will be the marker of our humanity and I think this is very beautiful.
Finally, in the cosmic theater of the twenty-first century, Silicon Valley tech giants pitch the conquest of outer space as the ultimate monument to human ingenuity—an era where artificial intelligence will unshackle us from our terrestrial chains. The engineering advancements are undeniably real and staggering: autonomous spacecraft that navigate the lethal voids of deep space without waiting for Earth's sluggish radio signals, machine learning models that sift through petabytes of cosmic data to discover new exoplanets in seconds, and hyper-precise algorithms that maneuver satellites away from catastrophic orbital debris. AI promises to be humanity’s tireless vanguard, enduring deadly radiation to build the infrastructure of an interplanetary species. However, this cosmic colonisation may lead directly to the birth of posthuman star warfare. The promise of peaceful exploration serves as a thin camouflage for the total militarisation of Earth's orbit. As autonomous sattelite-networks and orbital weapons systems are handed control of planetary security, the human veto may be entirely stripped away. The final frontier is transformed into a frictionless, data-driven battlefield where life and death are dictated by cold, algorithmic calculations. Humanity is not ascending to the heavens; we are sleepwalking into a reality where our celestial future is gatekept, commodified, and weaponised on purely corporate terms.
You discuss how AI and other forms of machine learning have inherited colonial modes of thinking, as exemplified by techno-orientalism. How can we learn from legacies of historical injustice in advancing more equitable AI?
We must first shatter the comforting illusion that algorithmic bias is a mere "technical glitch" to be patched with minor software updates. It is not. It is a digital resurrection of the ghost of empire. Modern machine learning has inherited a hierarchical, colonial mode of thinking rooted directly in the dark underside of the European Enlightenment. Just as biological racism was originally codified during the Enlightenment as a pseudoscientific weapon to justify Western colonial conquest, modern tech empires use the myth of mathematical neutrality to mask an aggressive, totalising expansion of data extraction. This is a systematic process of psycho-codification as indicated. We are bowing before the machine as if it were an infallible silicon god, when in reality, it is merely automating, scaling, and accelerating our historical sins.
This inheritance manifests very violently through techno-orientalism — a high-tech mutation of the classic colonial binary. Historically, Western empires manufactured "Orientalism" to frame the non-Western world as primitive, untrustworthy, and requiring forensic management. Today, techno-orientalism translates this prejudice into a digital panopticon. It builds biometric filters, predictive border-control tools, and automated surveillance networks that treat non-Western identities as inherent security risks. To forge an equitable AI, we must wage a philosophical revolt against the false premise of "objective" data. We must aggressively audit and purge these colonial power dynamics from training models, stripping monopolistic tech conglomerates of their power to impose corporate standards as universal human norms.
By forcing AI to exist under strict human vetoes and localised governance, we can transform technology from an instrument of imperial control into a weapon for social justice and genuine equality. That doesn’t mean that we all have to live the same, as communists suggested in the past. We don’t need more ascetic hypocrites in history. But it does mean that we try to widen the options for self-realisation in life so that they appear wider and more equally distributed, even in this age of “stupid money and power”.
How can our international legal architecture address the changes wrought onto the security landscape by artificial intelligence?
When I ask a conventional corporate lawyer for legal advice on AI, they tend to hand me a compliance checklist. They will talk about data privacy laws, algorithmic transparency, and corporate liability. So I think, standard legal advice under the current framework is a dangerous narcotic. It lulls society into a false sense of security while the algorithmic executioner sharpens its blade. Most modern AI legislation is not written to protect human dignity; it is drafted to legitimise corporate monopolies under the guise of "risk management".
We must aggressively reject corporate ethics-washing. The voluntary "ethical AI guidelines" and self-regulation frameworks heavily promoted by the tech lobby are nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to evade binding legal consequences. I have interacted with their oversight boards and I encourage everyone to do so. They truly are a farce. Ethics without teeth is merely public relations. Lawmakers must strip big tech of this shield, transforming passive ethical suggestions into severe, binding criminal and civil liabilities for tech oligarchs.
Second, the legal system must codify an absolute "human veto". Current regulatory loopholes allow corporate and state entities to delegate highly sensitive, life-altering choices to automated systems in the name of mathematical optimisation. Legislation must enforce a strict, mandatory barrier: no machine learning model should ever hold final legal authority. Whether deciding a criminal sentence, denying critical medical care, filtering a job applicant, or determining an automated murder of a civilian nuclear scientist in foreign countries, a human being must always possess the supreme, unalterable right to override the algorithm.
Finally, human rights lawyers must erect an airtight legal firewall that separates civilian technology from military AI. Deep-tech conglomerates are quietly fusing corporate data harvesting with state warfare. To halt this descent into autonomous posthuman warfare, international and domestic laws must be completely rewritten. We must enforce strict legal boundaries and compartments, guaranteeing that human commanders — and not autonomous silicon processors — are held fully and criminally accountable for violations of international humanitarian law. If the law fails to decolonise data and aggressively strip tech monopolies of their sovereignty, it ceases to be a shield for human dignity and becomes the paperwork certifying our subjugation.
What is the most important advice you could give to early career scholars?
Don’t be humble! I really don’t think intellectuals and academics need to be “humble” about all of this anymore. We are living during an era of intensely dangerous mass-stupidity, so we need to battle for the truth with our tempered and respectful selves fully intact. The so-called etiquette pushed upon us is a choke-holder to keep us in the ivory tower without a real voice. We need to articulate our dissent now more than ever which requires presence at the trenches without fear, equipped with full scholarly gear and without any anxiety about the revengeful system. In fact, democracy requires this vigilance now more than ever. Finding freedom in conjunction with the masses, within communities, rather than being a cloistered individualist, translates to today’s mass freedom ensuring our subjectivity.
For that, Early Career Scholars need what is rare today: mental power. In academia and wider society, the deterioration of mental health seems so widespread and accepted that it is almost impossible to think it a coincidence. A subdued, medicalised society doesn’t protest. Tired and drained intellectuals won’t think and stack our libraries with ideas. Orwell knew that, so did Foucault. But even their visionary scepticism couldn’t fathom the concerted attack on our culture and bio-security, on our very minds that the techno-politics of today exerts on a daily basis. Angst induced by the machine – the Persian intellectual Jalal al-e Ahmad called this a "technosis". We all carry this incredibly dangerous virus inside of us and we need to combat its effects on a daily basis with the detoxifying practice of self-realisation. So, here is an every-day checklist that some of us try to adhere to and which may be a template for others:
Practice a form of intellectual fortification in your private library. Many of us do that to reclaim private, analogue spaces for unmonitored human thought.
Perfect various techniques of radical privacy by actively deploying counter-technologies to mask identities and hide personal details from corporate entities.
Refuse optimisation: Intentionally pollute or refuse metrics that try to convert human identity and subjectivity into predictable political, social and consumer habits to be sold to Musk and co.
And first and foremost: sabotage biased tech by building AI community resistance projects in every favela and barrio of the world.
Editorial Credit: Yana Sadeghi