This talk, based on the recently published book The AI Matrix: Profits, Power, Politics by Daniel Mügge, Regine Paul, and Vali Stan, will introduce the book’s conceptual and analytical compass for navigating the global political economy of AI transformations. Drawing on critical political economy and economic geography, it argues that while an overarching dynamic of extraction, exploitation, and concentration—with the US and China as epicentres—shapes experiences of AI development and deployment across the globe, its refraction through the prism of variable institutional settings, tech-related discourses, geopolitical manoeuvres, as well as local agency and resistance, produces diverse yet interconnected articulations of global AI transformations. 

Public debate on artificial intelligence (AI) features a vocal battle between upbeat hopes for prosperity and global equality versus more alarming visions of massive job losses, increasing inequality, and an unparalleled concentration of wealth and power. As political economists (and critically-minded citizens), scepticism towards such grand narratives about a bifurcated global AI transformation is apt for at least four reasons: they downplay the role of political agency of states and institutions in navigating technological innovation and its effects; they obscure the powerful role of discourses and tech imaginaries in mobilising regulatory, fiscal and other politico-economic action; they nourish and are themselves fed by an intensifying geopolitical race to AI among a few global superpowers and their superrich tech business elites who display little consideration for the wellbeing of most people on this planet; and they are particularly inattentive to the unevenness of AI-fication processes within and between sectors, workplaces, or countries across the globe.