Madhumita Murgia

Madhumita Murgia is a British-Indian journalist, born in Bengaluru and raised in Mumbai, who in February 2023 became the Financial Times’ first artificial intelligence editor. Trained as a biologist at Oxford — she did AIDS-vaccine research before switching to journalism via NYU — she covered technology at Wired UK and The Telegraph before joining the FT in 2016 as its European technology correspondent.

Code Dependent

Her 2024 book “Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI” (Picador), shortlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, reports from the AI supply chain’s underside: data labelers in Kenya and Bulgaria, gig workers managed by opaque algorithms, doctors and caseworkers deferring to flawed systems. Murgia frames the pattern as “data colonialism,” borrowing the academic term to argue that tech companies are performing a resource extraction in which — rather than oil or cotton — “the resource is data,” and the extracted are the world’s poorest.

The book argues that this opacity is itself a harm: because ordinary people cannot see how AI systems work, they cannot comprehend when the systems go wrong or hurt them — a blindness Murgia says falls hardest on the vulnerable. She has called the implementation and governance of algorithms “a human rights issue.”

Murgia is a professional chronicler rather than a campaigner, and her critique carries a constructive edge — she has said AI should “augment us” and preserve what humans bring, and that she finds hope in the fact that “we are all still engaging with this, that we’re bringing to it our humanness, our empathy, our rage.” But her reporting’s thesis is unambiguous: as deployed today, AI’s costs fall hardest on those with the least power to refuse it.