This progress team examines the politics implicit in the technical development of artificial intelligence. In particular, they will work toward a one-day workshop in spring 2020 that will include student presentations and faculty panels on the “political economy of AI development," outlining how the technical decisions made by system designers and AI theorists when endorsing specific approaches (reinforcement learning, natural language processing, computational game theory) have direct and substantive implications for economic management and social well-being.

Without necessarily endorsing a particular strategy, the organizers anticipate this workshop could form the basis of an edited volume whose contributions draw analytical conclusions about the implications for AI development on a functional social order, and also form the basis for course syllabi in the School of Information and social science departments.