As I’ve noted occasionally before, one of the most potentially useful things that academics do is preparing syllabi, and hence organizing information about the world.
In addition to the Moynihan piece, I recommend a new report from Kevin de Liban and his non-profit, Techtonic Justice, “Inescapable AI: The Ways AI Decides How Low-Income People Work, Live, Learn, and Survive,” which focuses on the negative impacts of AI on low income people
I fear that by the time students get to take the course in spring 2026, some of the references will have aged poorly, primarily those dealing with current LLM technology. As the technology rapidly changes, this will require an update of the course, especially the elements that deal with it as a technology. The politics should hopefully be more resilient, but who knows? Five years from now, this course may be dictated by our new A[G]I overlords. ;-)
A large majority of this syllabus is already out of date or are propaganda pieces deliberately designed to mislead the public. Use common sense to understand what is happening. Over 100,000 jobs eliminated in Silicon Valley in the first six months of 2025. These were not replaced with different, better jobs. AI is viewed as a job replacement device by every CEO implementing it. It will increase unemployment and lower wages as it increases competition for jobs. Lower wages reduces economic growth as consumption falls. See GDP growth in the 1980’s vs the 2000’s. Historical patterns have no real relevance to the future of AI political economy since a technology like this has never existed before. Stop comparing this to electricity and the steam engine. That comparison is utterly meaningless.
Glad to have this. Especially after last week, I was glad to read your ARPS review essay ( https://bit.ly/FarreH-2025 ).
I'm preparing an undergraduate syllabus "AI and Society" with sociological tilt. This will lean heavily on economic ("sociology of work) and political sociology, while putting 20% or more of course share on human ecology (by which I mean hard biophysical realities, that social organization engages and converts; call this environmental sociology, broadly conceived as I think we should).
There is right now, zero overlap between my syllabus draft and yours, nor much overlap on my list of stuff that I've moved off the draft to make room. Without writing my *entire* syllabus draft into this blog reply (!), I wonder what anyone thinks about the following.
I'm thinking to allocate perhaps 20% or greater to the political economy of welfare state *income replacements*, from unemployment insurance to UBI and/or UBS (universal basic services). For that I'd start with Adam Bonica's tech-taxing UBI dreamworks he blogged about June 29th ( https://bit.ly/BonicA-2025-6_29 ). I'll put that next to a wide-swatting rejection of UBI on welfare policy-historical evidence by Bo Rothstein in Social Europe ( 2017, https://bit.ly/RothB-2017 ). Pivot off that into a deep crawl (like, a week or even a week and a half of class meeting time) on Walter Korpi's excellent, but neglected, 2002 Politics and Society paper "The Great Trough in Unemployment..." ( https://bit.ly/Korpi2002_P-S ). From there get into more contemporary transfer-payment assessments. One useful review that foregrounds the political sociology of UBI, I find in Jeff Manza, Theory and Society 2023 ( https://bit.ly/ManzaJ-2023_TS ). A narrower but still widely searching article I rate highly, and want to fit onto my syllabus, is ecological and political sociologist Max Koch putting Sweden in the spotlight ( 2021 in Social Policy and Society, https://bit.ly/KochMa-2021 ).
I assume we may conclude from mutual exploration in the course, that these "universal" transfer payment ambitions find little evidence of viability from political and economic history. But, what if masses of people *couldn't* work??? Koch (above) thinks in those welfare states already more encompassing and robust (the Nordics), perhaps UBS (services, not cash transfers) could work even as 71% of Swedes opposed UBI (cash transfers) in a 2020 survey.
The 2024 Bloomsbury book Feeding the Machine ( https://bit.ly/CaMuGr-2024 ) by Cant (sociologist of work), Muldoon (political theorist), and Graham (internet geographer), was going to loom large on my AI and Society syllabus this fall. I may soon drop that book to free up room for the above journey into sociology of welfare state income transfers for unemployed and under-employed. This summer as I hunt and read, I've swung from not having found as much empirical social science as I would like for this course, to piling up publications that easily could fill a year-long course. That's because of new developments in AI and society, and newer studies coming out, and some publications my searches missed but I find from references in newer papers I read. And then I've widened the scope to study proposed remedies to work loss and earnings loss, that originally I had not conceived for this course.
Even if the book Cant, Muldoon and Grahram book gets cut from this course, I'd want to follow its main upshot pointing to collective bargaining as, they think, the only pathway for egalitarian countervailing. Though it's a weakness in my view, that Feeding the Machine comes off, on my reading, naive about *politics* at national-state levels, including labor regulations. This moves me to grab and assign articles from the October 2024 forum published by Litwin et al in the October 2024 ILR Review ( https://bit.ly/LitwiEA-2024_10 ); from which I've read three articles, learned a lot, and plant to read the rest; then to decide which ones fit in my course.
I also have lined up some articles and book chapters by sociologists and others, that lay out the labor process theory (from Marxist sociology, via Braverman and more recent empirical refinements) to juxtapose with economists' routine-biased technological change theory. This, I'd like to put next to the contending studies that how high-skilled job losses in the USA as of late 2023, surveyed by sociologist Dahlin (2024, https://bit.ly/DahliE-2024-6 ). That now needs to be contrasted, I think contrary evidence from Denmark in the 2025 working paper by economists Humum and Vestergaard ( 2025, https://bit.ly/HumVes-2025 ), that I find summarized pretty well in Fortune by Ivanova (May 18, 2025: https://bit.ly/IvanoI-2025-5_18 ). I read the Humum and Vestergaard study as impressive and rigorous, matching administrative data to surveys and sampling a reasonable set of specific occupations. But Humum and Vestergaard wave away the Nordic welfare regime context of their observations, merely describing Denmark labor regulations as "flexible". I take Humum's and Vestergaard's study as indicating a need to put considerations of AI and work into political contexts of capitalist varieties.
Between my current draft and my cutting room floor, I'm weighing your (Henry Farrell) and Marion Fourcade's 2024 Economist essay on AI and rituals ( https://bit.ly/3TELSxs ). That, I found more up to date and overall more persuasive than your Dædalus 2023 that you both wrote (I see above drafted onto your syllabus). Also in earlier drafts for my course, I would have assigned Paul Krugman's 2024 review in Foreign Affairs ( https://fam.ag/3OcnmBr ) of your and Newman's book, Underground Empire; and then I'd lecture from the book itself. (Spoiler: I liked and learned from a lot from Underground Empire! Already I've assigned Krugman's review of it in a couple sections of Intro to American political development.). If I were to teach a politics version of my AI course at some point (I teach sociology and political science), then most likely I would assign *at least* Krugman's review of Underground Empire, if not Underground Empire itself.
Thank you very much for this rich syllabus. At the National University of Singapore (NUS), my colleague, Simon Chesterman, has been writing about AI and governance (see https://simonchesterman.com/2021/08/06/we-the-robots/) - which might be useful. And I do not have a particular citation, but in working with several NGOs in Asia, AI is quickly widening the digital divide and generating greater inequalities in some cases (though I like the suggestion below to read Kara's book on Cobalt Red).
Under “business model,” you should include any of Ed Zitron’s posts about the unsustainabilty of the massive VC investments in AI light of unlikely sufficient returns on those investments. https://www.wheresyoured.at/
Thank you for this syllabus. I'm an economist trying to my best to catch up on this issue. A good empirically based discussion of labor market effects, with useful links, is here:
I don't yet have the chops to publish peer-reviewed articles on this stuff. But as a way of (hopefully) developing the chops, I've been developing different syllabi for my course in philosophy of technology and material culture. This is an incredibly valuable guide. Thank you!
🤯🤯🤯🤯
Lost all cognitive function by Week 3. By Week 9 I was reorganizing my bookshelf and my worldview. Not sure if I should thank you or file a complaint.
In addition to the Moynihan piece, I recommend a new report from Kevin de Liban and his non-profit, Techtonic Justice, “Inescapable AI: The Ways AI Decides How Low-Income People Work, Live, Learn, and Survive,” which focuses on the negative impacts of AI on low income people
I fear that by the time students get to take the course in spring 2026, some of the references will have aged poorly, primarily those dealing with current LLM technology. As the technology rapidly changes, this will require an update of the course, especially the elements that deal with it as a technology. The politics should hopefully be more resilient, but who knows? Five years from now, this course may be dictated by our new A[G]I overlords. ;-)
Are you kidding? This is invaluable.
Suggest “Cobalt Red” by Siddarth Kara under the “material resources” week.
A large majority of this syllabus is already out of date or are propaganda pieces deliberately designed to mislead the public. Use common sense to understand what is happening. Over 100,000 jobs eliminated in Silicon Valley in the first six months of 2025. These were not replaced with different, better jobs. AI is viewed as a job replacement device by every CEO implementing it. It will increase unemployment and lower wages as it increases competition for jobs. Lower wages reduces economic growth as consumption falls. See GDP growth in the 1980’s vs the 2000’s. Historical patterns have no real relevance to the future of AI political economy since a technology like this has never existed before. Stop comparing this to electricity and the steam engine. That comparison is utterly meaningless.
Glad to have this. Especially after last week, I was glad to read your ARPS review essay ( https://bit.ly/FarreH-2025 ).
I'm preparing an undergraduate syllabus "AI and Society" with sociological tilt. This will lean heavily on economic ("sociology of work) and political sociology, while putting 20% or more of course share on human ecology (by which I mean hard biophysical realities, that social organization engages and converts; call this environmental sociology, broadly conceived as I think we should).
There is right now, zero overlap between my syllabus draft and yours, nor much overlap on my list of stuff that I've moved off the draft to make room. Without writing my *entire* syllabus draft into this blog reply (!), I wonder what anyone thinks about the following.
I'm thinking to allocate perhaps 20% or greater to the political economy of welfare state *income replacements*, from unemployment insurance to UBI and/or UBS (universal basic services). For that I'd start with Adam Bonica's tech-taxing UBI dreamworks he blogged about June 29th ( https://bit.ly/BonicA-2025-6_29 ). I'll put that next to a wide-swatting rejection of UBI on welfare policy-historical evidence by Bo Rothstein in Social Europe ( 2017, https://bit.ly/RothB-2017 ). Pivot off that into a deep crawl (like, a week or even a week and a half of class meeting time) on Walter Korpi's excellent, but neglected, 2002 Politics and Society paper "The Great Trough in Unemployment..." ( https://bit.ly/Korpi2002_P-S ). From there get into more contemporary transfer-payment assessments. One useful review that foregrounds the political sociology of UBI, I find in Jeff Manza, Theory and Society 2023 ( https://bit.ly/ManzaJ-2023_TS ). A narrower but still widely searching article I rate highly, and want to fit onto my syllabus, is ecological and political sociologist Max Koch putting Sweden in the spotlight ( 2021 in Social Policy and Society, https://bit.ly/KochMa-2021 ).
I assume we may conclude from mutual exploration in the course, that these "universal" transfer payment ambitions find little evidence of viability from political and economic history. But, what if masses of people *couldn't* work??? Koch (above) thinks in those welfare states already more encompassing and robust (the Nordics), perhaps UBS (services, not cash transfers) could work even as 71% of Swedes opposed UBI (cash transfers) in a 2020 survey.
The 2024 Bloomsbury book Feeding the Machine ( https://bit.ly/CaMuGr-2024 ) by Cant (sociologist of work), Muldoon (political theorist), and Graham (internet geographer), was going to loom large on my AI and Society syllabus this fall. I may soon drop that book to free up room for the above journey into sociology of welfare state income transfers for unemployed and under-employed. This summer as I hunt and read, I've swung from not having found as much empirical social science as I would like for this course, to piling up publications that easily could fill a year-long course. That's because of new developments in AI and society, and newer studies coming out, and some publications my searches missed but I find from references in newer papers I read. And then I've widened the scope to study proposed remedies to work loss and earnings loss, that originally I had not conceived for this course.
Even if the book Cant, Muldoon and Grahram book gets cut from this course, I'd want to follow its main upshot pointing to collective bargaining as, they think, the only pathway for egalitarian countervailing. Though it's a weakness in my view, that Feeding the Machine comes off, on my reading, naive about *politics* at national-state levels, including labor regulations. This moves me to grab and assign articles from the October 2024 forum published by Litwin et al in the October 2024 ILR Review ( https://bit.ly/LitwiEA-2024_10 ); from which I've read three articles, learned a lot, and plant to read the rest; then to decide which ones fit in my course.
I also have lined up some articles and book chapters by sociologists and others, that lay out the labor process theory (from Marxist sociology, via Braverman and more recent empirical refinements) to juxtapose with economists' routine-biased technological change theory. This, I'd like to put next to the contending studies that how high-skilled job losses in the USA as of late 2023, surveyed by sociologist Dahlin (2024, https://bit.ly/DahliE-2024-6 ). That now needs to be contrasted, I think contrary evidence from Denmark in the 2025 working paper by economists Humum and Vestergaard ( 2025, https://bit.ly/HumVes-2025 ), that I find summarized pretty well in Fortune by Ivanova (May 18, 2025: https://bit.ly/IvanoI-2025-5_18 ). I read the Humum and Vestergaard study as impressive and rigorous, matching administrative data to surveys and sampling a reasonable set of specific occupations. But Humum and Vestergaard wave away the Nordic welfare regime context of their observations, merely describing Denmark labor regulations as "flexible". I take Humum's and Vestergaard's study as indicating a need to put considerations of AI and work into political contexts of capitalist varieties.
Between my current draft and my cutting room floor, I'm weighing your (Henry Farrell) and Marion Fourcade's 2024 Economist essay on AI and rituals ( https://bit.ly/3TELSxs ). That, I found more up to date and overall more persuasive than your Dædalus 2023 that you both wrote (I see above drafted onto your syllabus). Also in earlier drafts for my course, I would have assigned Paul Krugman's 2024 review in Foreign Affairs ( https://fam.ag/3OcnmBr ) of your and Newman's book, Underground Empire; and then I'd lecture from the book itself. (Spoiler: I liked and learned from a lot from Underground Empire! Already I've assigned Krugman's review of it in a couple sections of Intro to American political development.). If I were to teach a politics version of my AI course at some point (I teach sociology and political science), then most likely I would assign *at least* Krugman's review of Underground Empire, if not Underground Empire itself.
Welcome any notes!
Arvind Narayanan recommended the United Nations report A Metter of Choice: People and Possibilities in the Age of AI.
Thank you very much for this rich syllabus. At the National University of Singapore (NUS), my colleague, Simon Chesterman, has been writing about AI and governance (see https://simonchesterman.com/2021/08/06/we-the-robots/) - which might be useful. And I do not have a particular citation, but in working with several NGOs in Asia, AI is quickly widening the digital divide and generating greater inequalities in some cases (though I like the suggestion below to read Kara's book on Cobalt Red).
For Week 10 Culture, you might find the stuff Justin Smith Ruiu is doing here on Substack worth a look.
Under “business model,” you should include any of Ed Zitron’s posts about the unsustainabilty of the massive VC investments in AI light of unlikely sufficient returns on those investments. https://www.wheresyoured.at/
Neat stuff. Might add something about Ai knowledge creation…both in quant studies and logical inference.
Thank you!
Thank you for this syllabus. I'm an economist trying to my best to catch up on this issue. A good empirically based discussion of labor market effects, with useful links, is here:
https://forklightning.substack.com/p/a-data-dri
I don't yet have the chops to publish peer-reviewed articles on this stuff. But as a way of (hopefully) developing the chops, I've been developing different syllabi for my course in philosophy of technology and material culture. This is an incredibly valuable guide. Thank you!