James is an artist and technologist whose work explores how AI can deepen human connection and presence. After a career at the intersection of technology and politics, including building Facebook’s political advertising tools, serving as the company’s embed on the Trump campaign, and becoming the first employee to identify patterns that would surface as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, he became obsessed with creating technology that amplifies our humanity rather than exploits it. ETHEREA, a real-time AI art system that transforms spaces into living canvases of light and imagination, represents this vision: using artificial intelligence not to manipulate attention, but to make our experiences more vivid, curious, and authentically human. Through projects like Autobiographer (an AI biographer), ETHEREA, and current work on autonomous storytelling agents, they’re dedicated to answering not what we can build with AI, but what we should build to bring us closer to ourselves and each other.