The Politics of AI Governance

Artificial Intelligence is now ubiquitous, an indelible part of both our private and public lives. At the same time, governments, businesses, communities, and individual persons continue to proffer conflicting prescriptions on how AI development should be governed, harnessed towards the public good, or perhaps significantly slowed down. All of this is to say that, despite the rapid technological advancements and massive adoption of AI models worldwide, the question of AI governance remains very much a political rather than a technical problem.
This panel invites papers that explore the political challenges of AI governance from diverse perspectives and theoretical approaches. Rather than treating AI governance as an entirely novel challenge, we particularly encourage contributions that bring established political science and international relations theories, concepts, methods, and historical experiences into conversation with contemporary debates about AI.
Some of the questions that the papers are invited to explore include:
What can existing scholarship at the intersection of institutions, global governance, security, and technology tell us about the opportunities and challenges to developing collective, multilateral frameworks for governing AI?
Conversely, what might AI governance reveal about the changing nature of political authority, sovereignty, global order, and governance itself?
How can theories about corporate power and state sovereignty, among others, shed light on the emerging political conundrum where AI governance is understood as a primary impediment to global supremacy?
The panel's ultimate objective is to foster a two-way conversation between AI governance and the study of politics: bringing the theoretical and empirical resources of political science to AI while asking how AI may transform some of the foundational assumptions through which political scientists understand governance.