New Researchers Join the Path to Power Project

Dr. Adam Kingsmith and Dr. Manuel Tonneau have joined the Path to Power Project, bringing new expertise in algorithmic governance and AI accountability and societal impacts of AI.

Dr. Adam Kingsmith is a postdoctoral researcher, investigating algorithmic governance, mental health, and the democratic implications of AI. His doctoral research at York University focused on the political economy of anxiety and the rise of biomedical industry. He has written and co-edited some books and articles on mental health policy, political economy, media and gamification studies, emotion-AI, labour, and social theory. These include: Anxiety as a Weapon (AU Press 2025); Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left (Fernwood Publishing 2020); One Road, Many Dreams (Bloomsbury Publishing 2019); The Radical Left and Social Transformation (Routledge 2018); A Schizo-Stroll (Permanent Sleep Press 2017).

Dr. Manuel Tonneau also joins as a postdoctoral researcher in the Business and Society Cluster at the HPI and an associated researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute. He studies the societal impacts of AI at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing and computational social science. His doctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, turned this lens on how AI systems moderate online speech, showing that the uniform community standards enforced by social media platforms worldwide fail to deliver the shared meaning, equitable resources and effective protection they promise users across the world. At HPI, Manuel will broaden this work to other domains, starting with how generative AI affects politics and the practice of science.