Public Policy and Artificial Intelligence: Vantage Points for Critical Inquiry

This chapter introduces three key lines of critical inquiry to address the relationship of artificial intelligence (AI) and public policy. We provide three vantage points to better understand this relationship, in which dominant narratives about AI’s merits for public sector decisions and service provision often clash with real world experiences of their limitations and illegal effects. First, we critically examine the politicaldrivers for, and significance of, how we define AI, its role and workings in the policy world; and how we demarcate the scope of regulation. Second, we explore the AI/policy relationship, by focusing on how it unfolds through specific, but often contradictory and ambivalent, practices, that in different settings, combine meaning, strategic action, technological affordances, as well as material/digital objects and their effects. Our third vantage point critically assesses how these practices are situated in an uneven political economy of AI technology production, and with what implications for global justice.