Join us at the Maughan Library to hear why libraries and archives matter more than ever for trust and knowledge in an AI‑driven world.

From memory stores to machine consciences: Libraries & archives preserve society’s values

In an age when artificial intelligence can generate, summarise, and simulate knowledge at scale, questions of trust, provenance, and public record have never been more important.

In this this talk, Professor Michael Mainelli, will explore why libraries and archives remain foundational civic institutions in a digital era - not as relics of paper, but as guarantors of memory, accountability, and intellectual integrity.

Drawing on current debates around ethical AI, data stewardship, and algorithmic transparency, Michael will reflect on how society can ensure that machine intelligence is trained, governed, and audited against reliable sources of record. He will also introduce his current research, Ordinary Wisdom, an AI project focused on secure data custody, timestamping, and chain of provenance - a modern complement to the archival principles long practised by institutions such as King’s.

At its heart, the talk will expound the belief that enduring investments in preserving knowledge underpin both democratic trust and responsible innovation.

About the speaker:

Professor Michael Mainelli KStJ OMRI FCCA FCSI(Hon) FBCS FRSA is Chairman and founder of Z/Yen Group, the City of London’s leading think-tank, and President of the London Chamber of Commerce & Industry. Educated at Harvard, Trinity College Dublin, and LSE, he has been a senior accountancy firm partner and Ministry of Defence research director. Michael is a fellow of KCL, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Birkbeck, Goodenough, and Gresham colleges, visiting professor at UCL and City St George’s, Bencher at Middle Temple, active in seventeen livery companies, past Master World Trader, Lord Mayor of London 2023-2024, Sheriff 2019-2021, with charity interests in the environment, education, and care. The Price Of Fish: A New Approach To Wicked Economics & Better Decisions, written with Ian Harris won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Finance, Investment & Economics Gold Prize. Michael has decades of deployment and research experience with technical and commercial aspects of AI, predictive analytics, and machine learning, dating to the late 1970s with large-scale neural networks, bringing support vector machine approaches to the UK from within MoD research in the 1990s, and building almost 50 operational systems, several of which are still in operation today ranging from MRI scanning to marketing impact improvement to high-volume fraud detection in finance.

Legacy Week is taking place from 16-20 March. To learn more about leaving a gift in your Will to King's, please visit kcl.ac.uk/legacies.

Should you have any queries regarding the event, please contact the Legacy Team prior to the event via legacies@kcl.ac.uk.

Alumni details will be passed onto the Alumni Office, who will hold your details to personalise your alumni supporter experience. If you would prefer not to hear from us you can unsubscribe from all further communications at any time by emailing forever@kcl.ac.uk. For information on how we use your details please see our privacy statement.