The Wicked Problem of AI Governance

Abstract

What this paper argues is that in the neoliberal economic paradigm, AI technologies reinforce and are constituted by an economic logic based on profit maximisation. That is, AI as an essential ingredient of global economic power is co-opted into the exploitative structures of neoliberal capitalism. It is a key driver of the emerging platform-based economic order that intensifies an already unequal and unfair international development context. Surprisingly though, this facet of AI is hardly alluded to in the debates on AI governance, which, while taking note of rights-based violations—discrimination and inequality in particular—and uncertain futures of work, propose liberalist, structural interventions (focusing on correcting misrecognition but not maldistribution) at best and neoliberal, individualistic fixes (that transfer burdens of navigating the digital economy on individuals) at worst. The political economic dimensions of the AI paradigm and implications of AI for the structures of choice, or in Senian terms, “equality of autonomy”,7 is left untouched in such framings. Current analysis therefore misses the point about how relations of power at various levels are being recast in the AI-based global economy.

Keywords: neoliberalism, artificial intelligence, digital economy, platform economy, India