Lydia Nobbs is a Politics PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research. Her research explores the political economy of artificial intelligence.

Alongside the intensifying cycles of hype and wariness around AI, Lydia considers the lifecycle of one AI technology—voice recognition—as a lens both on the shifting power dynamics that the AI-configuration brings into three of its necessary technological components: algorithms, cloud (powerful computers and centralized data storage), and data. These components overdetermine increasing corporate consolidation. The winner-take-all dynamics have ensured that the biggest corporations controlling AI technologies wield power on a scale not seen before. If one understanding of power is as capacity, what does the presence of this AI configuration do to our political economy? What counterpolitics might we hope for?

For at least two hundred years, both public and social science spheres have implicitly centered a “states v markets” analysis for most political problems. Yet features of the techno-political-economic configuration that make AI possible are outside the existing analytical categories of social science. Further, existing intervention tools—like antitrust law and regulation—are grounded in twentieth conceptions of monopoly power and are therefore inadequate for addressing AI’s political-economic impact.

The particular qualities of AI technologies—global in reach, pervasive, human­like (though operating through fundamentally different mechanisms to human comprehension, as a matter of probability rather than understanding), and deep in layers of black boxes—seem to make this not just a change in degree but in the kind of power to which we have typically applied our conceptual and analytical tools.

Lydia’s project at GIDEST asks how this configuration—of technological, political, and economic forces that makes AI technology feasible—came to be and how it is reconfiguring our political economy. It is part conceptual intervention, part historical analysis, and part a reimagination of counterpolitics.