Towards an International Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence

This volume seeks to leverage academic interdisciplinarity to develop insight into how Artificial intelligence (AI), the latest GPT to emerge, may influence or radically change socio-political norms, practices, and institutions. AI may best be understood as a predictive technology. Prediction is the process of filling in missing information. Prediction takes information you have, often called data, and uses it to generate information you dont have (Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb 2018, 13; also see Mayer-Schonberger and Ramge 2018). AI makes prediction cheap because the cost of information is now close to zero. Cheap prediction through AI technologies are radically altering how we govern ourselves, interact with each other, and sustain society. Contributors to this volume represent the academic disciplines of Sociology and Political Science working within a diverse set of intra-disciplinary fields that when combined, yield novel insights into the following questions guiding this volume: How might AI transform people? How might AI transform socio-political practices? How might AI transform socio-political institutions?