AI Workers, Geopolitics, and Algorithmic Collective Action

TL;DR

This paper argues that AI governance is constrained by International Political Economy dynamics, which heighten the influence of powerful AI firms and reduce the effectiveness of top-down regulation. It extends ACA to consider AI workers in corporate and research labs as geopolitical actors whose unique skills, mobility, and activism can catalyze responsible and just AI development. By integrating Participatory Design, the authors propose PD-informed, bottom-up interventions that involve AI workers in reflecting on geopolitics and co-creating tools to enable collective action within AI systems. The work offers a pathway to complement governance with worker-centered strategies, emphasizing distributed, participatory ACA to mitigate negative externalities and imaginaries of more equitable AI futures.

Abstract

According to the theory of International Political Economy (IPE), states are often incentivized to rely on rather than constrain powerful corporations. For this reason, IPE provides a useful lens to explain why efforts to govern Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the international and national levels have thus far been developed, applied, and enforced unevenly. Building on recent work that explores how AI companies engage in geopolitics, this position paper argues that some AI workers can be considered actors of geopolitics. It makes the timely case that governance alone cannot ensure responsible, ethical, or robust AI development and use, and greater attention should be paid to bottom-up interventions at the site of AI development. AI workers themselves should be situated as individual agents of change, especially when considering their potential to foster Algorithmic Collective Action (ACA). Drawing on methods of Participatory Design (PD), this paper proposes engaging AI workers as sources of knowledge, relative power, and intentionality to encourage more responsible and just AI development and create the conditions that can facilitate ACA.