Colum Finnegan

I am a philosopher of mind and technology at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in the University of Cambridge. I think about how the design of modern technologies, from social media to large language models, reshapes human cognition, social resilience, and, over longer horizons, cultural evolution.

Much of my current work concerns a risk I call structural stagnation: that as AI systems automate research and settle into the patterns already present in their training data, they may quietly foreclose the paradigm-breaking shifts that drive scientific discovery and moral progress, locking in today's frameworks exactly when the problems we face demand new ones.

This sits inside a broader interest in epistemic security: how a landscape of algorithmic curation and AI-generated content creates new vulnerabilities for social cohesion, democratic resilience, and collective agency, and what might protect them. Alongside it I work with Sonja Amadae on the philosophy and strategy of nuclear weapons and global catastrophic risk, and help lead a handbook project developing that field.

My doctoral work at University College Cork extended the mindshaping framework, the study of how social interaction brings our cognitive capacities into being, into a tool for diagnosing how online communication architectures cause harm, and how they might be redesigned to prevent it. The through-line is a single question: what cognitive and institutional conditions does humanity need to navigate this century's existential threats, and how do we foster and protect them?

Epistemic Diversity and Artificial Superintelligence (in Philosophy of AI: Volume 1, Springer, forthcoming). An argument for keeping humans in the loop: diverse human judgement as a hedge against the epistemic monocultures that advanced AI tends to produce.

Mindshaping Online: Strategic Signaling and Coordination Noise (in The Routledge Handbook of Mindshaping, 2025). How online platforms reshape the signals people use to coordinate, and the distortions that follow.

Naturalizing Normativity: Neopragmatist Reflections on Mental Disorder (with A. Ilieva, Synthese, 2025). A neopragmatist account of what we are doing when we call a mental state disordered.

Shaping Mind with Narrative (in Environmental Ethics in Western and Buddhist Philosophy, Bloomsbury, forthcoming). How narrative shapes our moral response to the environment, read through a Buddhist-pragmatist lens.

Reframing Our World: Examining the Crisis of Crises (Aigne Journal, 2020). On how the way we frame overlapping global crises shapes our capacity to respond to them.

A fuller list, including co-authored and teaching-related work, is on ORCID.

I'm always glad to hear from people thinking about adjacent questions, whether in philosophy, in AI, or in the governance of both. The surest way to reach me is by email, at cgf30@cam.ac.uk. You can also download my CV or browse my record on ORCID.