Special Issue on the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence in Latin America
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly permeating all aspects of daily life and global and regional configurations, including the biosphere. The extent of the transformations related to Artificial Intelligence, whether positive or negative, is being scrutinized by governments, corporations, and civil society. For some, AI represents a serious threat to citizens and societies, state security and market competition, in its various forms. For others, AI embodies a civilizational transformation for which we must prepare and opt for one or a combination of the political economic projects pertaining to its governance. In this context, most academic research has been written in the Global North, contrasting with few contributions focused on what is happening in the Global South in relation to these changes.
This special issue on the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence in Latin America seeks to contribute to global debates concerning the impact, limitations, and transformations of AI within the region. Relevant issues include the political economy of AI itself, as well as the specificities of the region, impacted by inequalities. This includes informal labor structures, security, power relations, indigenous peoples, industrialization, extractivism and climate change, extensive regional migratory flows, identities, and governance. AI is rapidly becoming another factor in Latin America’s Global Political Economy. However, present indicators demonstrate that AI may serve to amplify both the positive and negative conditions of the periphery. This special issue welcomes multidisciplinary, decolonial and intersectional research focusing on the Global Political Economy of AI in Latin America and its implications for public policy, human rights, regulation, and governance in the region.
We invite submissions that address (but are not limited to) the following themes:
- The impact, transformations and challenges brought about by competing political economy projects of governance and public policy of AI in the region. Dilemmas and tensions between market-led, security-driven and citizen-rights oriented approaches and policies, their winners, and losers.
- The impact of AI on citizen rights, private life, and consumerism, democracy, policy conflicts, surveillance and privacy, job displacement and informal sectors, discrimination, welfare.
- The uses of transformations of AI by indigenous, Afro-latinx, migrant, LGBTQI+ and other marginalized populations. This includes examining the role of IA in exacerbating, mitigating, or transforming existing social inequalities.
- The political economic dynamics of AI in relation to industrial and strategic sectors, including competition, regulation and development of small enterprises, market concentration, innovation, as well as the GPE and policy implications for AI hardware and software sectors.
- Capacity building, infrastructure development and knowledge circulation on AI, including North-South, South-South, regional, and national endogenous circuits.
- The contradictions, challenges and outcomes that arise from the relationship between the AI and the environment, including the examination of factors such as climate change, extractivism, global supply chains, the economy, energy transition, and technological development.
