Levers of Power in the Field of AI

TL;DR

This paper investigates how decision makers across various sectors exercise power and influence in AI governance, using fictional personas and a governance framework to reveal institutional dynamics and suggest pathways for policy engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel institutional governance framework and fictional personas to analyze power dynamics among AI decision makers across sectors.

Findings

Twelve fictional personas illustrate decision-making in AI governance.

Personal agency and institutional structures intersect in shaping AI policies.

Provides testable hypotheses for future research on institutional change.

Abstract

This paper examines how decision makers in academia, government, business, and civil society navigate questions of power in implementations of artificial intelligence. The study explores how individuals experience and exercise levers of power, which are presented as social mechanisms that shape institutional responses to technological change. The study reports on the responses of personalized questionnaires designed to gather insight on a decision maker's institutional purview, based on an institutional governance framework developed from the work of Neo-institutionalists. Findings present the anonymized, real responses and circumstances of respondents in the form of twelve fictional personas of high-level decision makers from North America and Europe. These personas illustrate how personal agency, organizational logics, and institutional infrastructures may intersect in the governance of AI. The decision makers' responses to the questionnaires then inform a discussion of the field-level personal power of decision makers, methods of fostering institutional stability in times of change, and methods of influencing institutional change in the field of AI. The final section of the discussion presents a table of the dynamics of the levers of power in the field of AI for change makers and five testable hypotheses for institutional and social movement researchers. In summary, this study provides insight on the means for policymakers within institutions and their counterparts in civil society to personally engage with AI governance.