“Predicting without understanding”: Elena Esposito at the ComAI Lecture in Hamburg
On 5 October 2026, sociologist Elena Esposito gave a ComAI Lecture as part of the research group’s meeting at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI).
Prediction is the core principle of generative AI, yet we still lack a theory of prediction. Starting from this observation, Esposito asked what it means when algorithms predict without explaining. Her argument: predictive models are not weaker explanations but a distinct way of dealing with an open future. They offer no understanding of causes, but they open up ways of acting on consequences.
Drawing on examples from medicine, insurance and policing, and on a comparison with historical practices of divination, she showed how individual and context-bound such predictions are, and why the criteria for what counts as a good prediction differ so much from one field to the next.
Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at Bielefeld University and the University of Bologna and the author of (among others) “Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence” (MIT Press, 2022).
We thank Elena Esposito for a stimulating lecture and the HBI for hosting us.
7. October 2026
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp
ZeMKI, Center for Media, Communication and Information Research
University of Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67620
Assistent Mrs. Schober: +49 421 218-67603
E-mail: andreas.hepp@uni-bremen.de
