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.

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”.........

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