Archived Events Detail

Speaker:
Tobias Tober (ZENiT Research Fellow / Politics and Public Administration & Cluster "The Politics of Inequality")

Abstract:

While traditional economic thinking regarded technological progress as “the tide lifting all boats,” empirical work increasingly suggests that the economic benefits of recent technological change are highly asymmetrically distributed between the winners and losers of this process. In this talk, I will describe the political consequences of this unequal benefit structure by providing an overview of recent political science literature on the topic, including my own contributions. The focus will be on those adversely affected by technological change, particularly their voting behavior and their demand for various types of policy responses. Next, I will relate these empirical findings to my ZENiT project, “Rage against the Machine? The Distributional and Political Implications of Artificial Intelligence.” I will discuss whether and how the political impact of AI might differ and how we will attempt to study these questions in the project.