Dr Jorge Pereira Campos

What does a mind keep when a machine does part of its thinking?

I study how people decide what to hand over to a machine: first their data, and lately their thinking. I also help run a company, which keeps the theory honest.

Latest essay, June 2026When the Watcher Became the ConfidantAbout my work
Recent essays

Research on AI and decision-making

It began with cyclists in Milton Keynes deciding whether to give the council their commuting data, and has since moved on to college students who share their location with their friends around the clock, and adolescents who ask ChatGPT what they think. Underneath is one question about consumer behaviour that marketing has always cared about, now with a machine on the other side of the counter. The papers are in Human–Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Frontiers in Developmental Psychology and Surveillance & Society.

PublicationsTeaching

Leadership

Since 2020 I have been chief operating officer and a partner at A&J Group, an international education company. We reached seven-figure revenue in two tax years without outside investment, which in education is about as common as a quiet staff room. I took the school through its WASC and Array Global accreditations, and in 2024 A&J School received The King’s Award for Enterprise, the highest official honour a British business can receive. I also lead AI adoption inside companies, which is where my research meets a quarterly target.

Leadership

Coming of Age in the AI Era

A book about the first generation that may never know what it is like to be stuck on a question for a week. It argues that adolescents need two things these systems are built to remove, friction and forgetting, and it is written for anyone who has to decide what to do about that, at home or at work. The manuscript is finished and with publishers.

About the book

The essays are the public part of that work: what AI changes in the way people learn and decide, written for anyone who shapes other people’s decisions, from a parent to a head of team or a brand.

About my work

The Journal

  1. When the Watcher Became the Confidant

    For the better part of 70 years, the machines that profile us and the machines we confide in ran on separate tracks; with conversational AI, the watcher became the confidant.

  2. A Question, Five Years Later

    A return, five years on, to a question I could not properly answer at my PhD viva: if privacy is fundamentally about the formation of the self in relation to others, what does it mean when the population most affected — adolescents — is the population in active formation?

  3. The Social Media Verdict Got It Half Right.

    The trial proved that social media companies built a product that is addictive by design; that is the supply side.

  4. I Think We're Blaming the Wrong Thing for Anxious Kids

    Jonathan Haidt's argument is somewhat incomplete: anxiety among young people had been climbing steadily since at least the 1950s, and pre-existing anxiety predicted heavier and more compulsive phone use, not the other way around.

Subscribe

Letters arrive when an essay is finished, never more than one a fortnight.

The Broadcasts

Cover of Coming of Age, the podcast
Also in video, on YouTube

The Podcast

Coming of Age

Conversations, monologues, and sometimes rants about what it means to grow up, as people and as societies, in a world that keeps changing under our feet.

  1. Episode II10 min

    I asked a Harvard Professor what the internet is doing to us

    I asked Tim McCarthy, a Harvard professor, what living online is doing to us.

    Watch on YouTube

  2. Episode I11 min

    Harvard's Tim McCarthy: Will the world ever be just?

    For the first episode of Coming of Age, I asked Dr Tim McCarthy, a historian at Harvard, a question I can't answer on my own: will there ever be a time when everything is just?

    Watch on YouTube

The programme also runs in video: the conversations in full, with shorter talks, on the channel.

All episodesPodcast RSSYouTube

Cover concept for Coming of Age in the AI Era

In submission

Coming of Age in the AI Era

A book about what I call the inferential childhood: growing up in the company of machines that infer who a child is, and increasingly act on the inference, at the one age a person is meant to be working that out for themselves. It argues that generative AI has carried the logic of the recorded, predicted life into the last unrecorded space of childhood, and that the remedy is human, and still within reach.

Manuscript complete, about 58,000 words, and in submission.

About the bookThe inferential childhood, in two rooms

In the media
TVI (Televisão Independente, Portugal): a television interview on A&J School receiving The King’s Award for Enterprise (International Trade) in 2024.

Research and lectures

Selected publications

  • Mols, A., Pereira Campos, J., Ferreira Gonçalves, J. F. (2026). "Those blimmin Ts and Cs": A mixed methods analysis of how people manage personal information, privacy, and impressions. Human–Computer Interaction 41(2), 83–100. doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2024.2325340
  • Barkhuus, L., Seberger, J. S., Pereira Campos, J., Mols, A. (2026). Like guardian angels: Continuous location-sharing and the production of safety among US college students. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 35(2), Article 7. doi.org/10.1007/s10606-026-09543-7
  • Pereira Campos, J., Koff, T. (2026). Your brain on ChatGPT, but whose brain? The missing adolescent in AI-cognition research. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology 4, 1885225. doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1885225
  • Mols, A., Pereira Campos, J., Pridmore, J. (2023). Family surveillance: Understanding parental monitoring, reciprocal practices, and digital resilience. Surveillance & Society 21(4), 469–484. doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i4.15645

All publications, from journal articles to EU deliverables

TalksCornell Tech · University of Chicago · Surveillance Studies Network, Rotterdam · Cardiff University · Vrije Universiteit Brussel · Educare Gondomar

Recognition

A&J School, the online school I head, received The King’s Award for Enterprise (International Trade) in 2024.

Advisory

I take on a small number of engagements each year with families and schools, on the questions that come up when children grow up with AI at their elbow.

The work is by referral and it is confidential: there are no testimonials or case studies, and there is no public client list.

Advisory

London · Porto · Geneva

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