Artificial Intelligence, Forward-Looking Governance and the Future of Security

Abstract

Over the last years, AI applications have come to play a role in many security-related fields. In this paper, we show that scholars who want to study AI’s link to power and security should widen their perspective to include conceptual approaches from science and technology studies (STS). This way, scholars can pay attention to critical dynamics, processes, practices, and non-traditional actors in AI politics and governance. We introduce two STS-inspired concepts – the micro-politics of design and development and co-production – and show how the study of AI and security could benefit from them. In the final section, we turn to the study of AI in the context of Switzerland to underscore what aspects the two previously introduced concepts help to highlight that remain invisible for traditional approaches.