Being Human When Digital: Laura Bates and Nasser Eledroos on AI as a Threat

Artificial Intelligence is celebrated, speculated upon and warned against, all the time, everywhere. However you feel about this technology, you can’t ignore it and neither should you. The Atlantic Institute will be looking at Artificial Intelligence (AI): as presenting both threat and hope, in a two-part series running in November 2025 and January 2026.

First, we will examine the threat of artificial intelligence at at a Zoom live event on Nov. 17 at 15:00 GMT at the Atlantic Institute XR Lab, Oxford, where we are also inviting people to join us in the Lab in person. We will consider the current societal tipping point and the need to confront the harm that this technology already causes. 

We are delighted to bring together Laura Bates, a leading feminist thinker and author of the best-selling book, “The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny,” and Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity and public interest technologist, Nasser Eledroos. Alongside the Institute’s XR Lead, Alice Wroe, they will explore the growing societal and ethical threats against equity posed by Artificial Intelligence and consider how we, as a community of hope and action, can respond to its risks at this pivotal moment. 

In this two-part series, we will pilot new programming techniques: Laura and Nasser will be embodied using telepresence robotic technology. Join us as we test and learn, as part of an ongoing exploration of how we can be meaningfully together when we are physically apart. 

Please sign up here to watch the Zoom live event from the XR Lab.

If interested in taking part as a member of the in-person audience in Oxford, contact Alice at alice.wroe@atlanticfellows.org.

Look out for details of the second part of this series in January 2026, when we will explore the promise and hope that artificial intelligence offers humanity!