Who Elected Big Tech?

There is growing public awareness that the velocity of technological innovation has outstripped the West’s efforts to harness it to the common good. An unprecedented shift in the balance of power between multinational industry and national governments has been a necessary condition for these new challenges. The talk will explore the causes and consequences of these trends for democratic sustainability, digital decolonization, the gig economy, and freedom of expression in the West and in the developing world.

A joint event of the TU Wien Informatics Doctoral School and the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML) in the context of Digital Humanism.

About Allison Stanger

Allison Stanger is Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College; 2021-23 Research Affiliate (co-lead, Responsible Hybrid Intelligence Initiative) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; an External Professor and Science Board member at the Santa Fe Institute; and a Senior Advisor to the OSUN Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. This November, she is also a guest professor of Informatics at TU Wien and a digital humanism senior fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM). In 2020-21, she held the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress, and in 2019-2020, she was Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at the EJ Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University. She is a founding signatory of the Digital Humanism Manifesto. Her books include Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Chinese edition to appear in spring 2023); One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy; and Complexity Economics (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker). Stanger is a contributing writer for the Atlantic. She has been called to testify before Congress on five occasions and recently served as a peer reviewer for the National Academies 2022 report, “Fostering Responsible Computing.” Stanger received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. She majored in mathematics as an undergraduate and has programming experience in both ancient and modern computer languages (APL, Assembler, BASIC, Cobol, Fortran, C++, Java).

For students

The lecture series of research talks by the guest professors of the TU Wien Informatics Doctoral School can also be credited as an elective course for students of master programs of computer science: 195.072 Current Trends in Computer Science.

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