AI Workers, Geopolitics, and Algorithmic Collective Action
It addresses the problem of uneven AI governance for policymakers and AI developers, but is incremental as it builds on existing work in geopolitics and design.
This position paper argues that AI workers should be viewed as geopolitical actors, proposing that governance alone is insufficient for responsible AI and advocating for bottom-up interventions like Participatory Design to empower workers and foster Algorithmic Collective Action.
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.