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Artificial intelligence (AI) is heralded as a revolutionary force in the global economy. But the transformation it brings is not simply about new technology as a driver of change. It is about who owns it, what they want to do with it, who can pay for it, and how other economic actors around the world – from legacy manufacturing firms in the Global North to farmers in the Global South – must adjust.
This book explores AI systems as products of unequal and conflictual power relations. It exposes grand AI narratives as rhetorical ammunition in political fights over tech futures and socio-economic distribution. Tech giants leverage infrastructure and data to cement their global dominance. Meanwhile, geopolitical competition between China and the United States increasingly dominates the AI economy, entrenching globe-spanning dependencies. The AI Matrix is an essential guide to the real-world economic dynamics that AI unleashes.
This book cuts through the hype surrounding artificial intelligence to reveal how profit motives, distorted tech narratives and geopolitical competition shape its evolution. Exposing common blind spots in public discourse, it challenges the myth of lab-driven innovation and technological imperatives, offering a powerful lens on the interplay between political and corporate power. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand who truly benefits from the AI revolution and who bears its costs.
— Cornelia Woll, Professor of International Political Economy and President of the Hertie School, Berlin
A much needed, well-researched guide to help us cut through hype and hysteria and understand the high stakes gambles around AI.
— Marietje Schaake, columnist, Financial Times
Jampacked with novel insights, this visionary book exposes how political rivalry, profit-seeking, and technological hype are combining to produce highly uneven consequences of AI for people and the planet. It compellingly shows why a balanced and nuanced understanding of AI’s economic benefits and harms is vital to achieving just and sustainable global governance.
— Peter Dauvergne, Professor of International Relations, University of British Columbia
Finally, a readable takedown of the inevitability of AI! Chockful of convincing analysis, The AI Matrix helps us see why a potentially transformative technology is instead following old cultural scripts and replicating geopolitical patterns. The book contests the myths that underlie the spread of panicky AI hype and the unprecedented boom in its investment, myths about the novelty of the AI summer, its overnight market penetration, and whether its adoption promises to boost output or just redistribute it. Reading The AI Matrix is like walking with a knowledgeable guide holding a comprehensive map to a new and sometimes bewildering world: by the end, you might be apprehensive or even outraged, but you are also a bit smarter, acutely aware of what’s at stake, and most definitely grateful for the experience.
— Allison Pugh, Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Daniel Mügge is Professor of Political Arithmetic in the political science department of the University of Amsterdam.
Regine Paul is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Vali Stan is a political economy research assistant at the University of Amsterdam.
1. Beyond the hype: a global political economy view of AI
2. AI’s deep roots and many forms
3. American AI and the Chinese challenge
4. Uneven effects across and within sectors
5. Uneven effects on labour
6. Uneven effects in the rest of the world
7. AI futures seen through a global political economy lens