The diffusion of technologies under the artificial intelligence (AI) banner has been likened to a new industrial revolution. Scholarship on the politics of socio-economic change suggest, however, that grand narratives inspired by technological determinism and universalism ought to be met with caution. AI technologies (AITs) are indeed liable to transform our politics, but those changes will be shaped by the power relations, institutions, and imaginaries entrenched in the global political economy. This Workshop leverages political economy theories, typologies, and methodologies to map the socio-political changes wrought by AITs in in conceptually nuanced and empirically systematic ways.
How does the recent diffusion of AI technologies transform political economies? Some foresee a massive boost to prosperity and cost-effective problem-solving of issues such as climate change (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014; cf. Dauvergne 2020). Several political economists, in contrast, have painted dystopian pictures: under headings such as digital capitalism (Staab 2019), platform capitalism (Boyer 2022, Langley and Leyshon 2017, Pasquale 2016, Srnicek 2017), platform economy (Kenney and Zysman 2016, Grabher and König 2020), or surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019, partly Cohen 2017), they see data-driven capitalist accumulation exacerbating the concentration of politico-economic power. In consequence, so they worry, states increasingly struggle to regulate digital technologies and to cushion their adverse effects through welfare states and other territorially-bound fiscal and redistributive measures (Farrell and Fourcade 2023; Fourcade and Gordon 2020; Greve 2019; van Gerven 2022). Certainly in a global perspective, ordinary citizens suffer, as already vulnerable populations and workers become increasingly dispensable and dependent (Atanasoski and Vora 2019; Crawford 2021; Dauvergne 2020; Dyer-Witheford et al. 2019; Kwet 2022).
Such grand narratives, so the premise of this Workshop, lack nuance. The impact of AIT diffusion is mediated by already existing power relations, institutions, and imaginaries. Those can both mitigate and amplify transformations—and in any case ensure that the latter vary both geographically and sectorally (cf. Boyer 2022; Rahman and Thelen 2019). AI capitalism, in short, has many faces. The aim of the Workshop is to bring together, integrate and promote the conceptual and empirical efforts to do justice to this variegated development.
1: How do typologies in institutionalist political economy (e.g. VoC) help us explore variable AI tech development?
2: How does AI tech transform labour markets and industrial relations within and across spatial/sectoral boundaries?
3: How do different welfare states respond to AIT diffusion and to what extent are they able to mitigate its effects?
4: How can we explain variable AIT regulation, including its underpinning narratives/imaginaries of tech futures?
5: How can we best explore the relationship between AIT diffusion and power relations and inequalities across the globe?
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| Algorithmic Global Wealth Chains |
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| Regulating fast, disrupting slow? How government and business elites in Germany and France are coordinating industrial policy measures for autonomous driving |
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| When the Korean developmental state meets the data economy |
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| Navigating the Varied Faces of AI Capitalism: Unraveling Regulatory Complexities in Law and Political Economy |
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| Business Preferences and Lobbying Coalitions in US Platform Regulation |
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| Divergence in Dominance: A Comparative Analysis of Alphabet and Baidu |
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| Design-by-Analogy: Can past certification use-cases inform ethical AI certification? |
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| Artificial intelligence and the variegated reconfiguration of the global political economy |
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| (Infra)structural Problems of the Technoscientific State? Rereading Claus Offe’s Critical State Theory in the Age of AI Capitalism |
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| The Abstract Machine: Public-Private-Partnerships in the implementation of artificial intelligence in the public sector |
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