Former director of TED conferences Bruno Giussani’s meditation on AI’s influence and how to resist it.

Author, curator, and podcaster Bruno Giussani was the European director and global curator of the TED conferences for two decades (2005–24). In Our Minds Under Siege, the specialist of digital culture writes about the “technologies of influence” and their social and political implications. In a world saturated with information, social media, artificial intelligence, and strategies of cognitive influence, our capacity for thinking clearly and understanding reality are themselves under threat. It is no longer only about disinformation and fake news: these technologies capture our attention, appropriate our data, analyze and exploit our emotions, and challenge our autonomy of thought.

Giussani decrypts how AI and other algorithmic technologies work and what their impacts are. He explains the nature of the relationship that is developing between us and these machines and the economic and power structures in which they exist. Finally, he offers guidance on how to resist this technological takeover and how to become competent users of AI without being used by it.