“If we continue to believe that bigger is better, we are continuing to give credibility to a model that is ultimately enabling global reach and global dominance by a handful of companies.” – Meredith Whittaker, Signal
This month’s ADAPT Radio episode features a riveting session from ADAPT’s annual industry forum, ADVANCE 2025, with a candid fireside chat between Dr Abeba Birhane, of the AI Accountability Lab at ADAPT and Trinity College Dublin, and Meredith Whittaker, President of the Signal Foundation. The episode, titled “Agentic AI: Convenience or Compromise?”, examines what it really means to let AI agents take control of our digital lives.
Meredith warns that “If we continue to believe that bigger is better, we are continuing to give credibility to a model that is ultimately enabling global reach and global dominance by a handful of companies. There’s another piece that gets into measurements and epistemology, where we need to step back and be like, how is better being assessed? Who gets to measure that?.” As AI companions gain access to personal data including driver’s licenses, calendars, and contact lists, the line between assistance and surveillance grows dangerously thin.
Abeba and Meredith strip away the hype to ask who truly benefits when AI agents promise convenience at the cost of autonomy. They discuss how “open source AI” has been turned into a marketing ploy, how digital assistants exploit outdated psychological tactics, and what real sovereign AI would require: democratic oversight, trusted local data, and control over deployment infrastructure.
With regulation still trailing technology, this conversation exposes what is really at stake for privacy, platform neutrality, and digital sovereignty. It is not only about who builds AI but who owns it, who profits from it, and who is left without power in the process.
Now in its fifth year, ADVANCE is ADAPT’s flagship forum uniting leading academics, industry experts, entrepreneurs, and policy-makers in artificial intelligence, offering a dynamic platform for sharing ideas, insights, cutting-edge research, and exploring the future of AI. This year the event explored how trusted, collaborative innovation can help public and private organisations adopt and scale AI and emerging digital technologies.
