Ai-Tocracy

Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Yang and Noam Yuchtman

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2023, vol. 138, issue 3, 1349-1402

Abstract: Recent scholarship has suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) technology and autocratic regimes may be mutually reinforcing. We test for a mutually reinforcing relationship in the context of facial-recognition AI in China. To do so, we gather comprehensive data on AI firms and government procurement contracts, as well as on social unrest across China since the early 2010s. We first show that autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial-recognition AI as a new technology of political control, and increased AI procurement indeed suppresses subsequent unrest. We show that AI innovation benefits from autocrats’ suppression of unrest: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets and are more likely to export their products; noncontracted AI firms do not experience detectable negative spillovers. Taken together, these results suggest the possibility of sustained AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjad012 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: AI-tocracy (2021)
Working Paper: AI-tocracy (2021)
Working Paper: AI-tocracy (2021)
Working Paper: AI-tocracy (2021)
Working Paper: AI-tocracy (2021)
Working Paper: AI-tocracy (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:138:y:2023:i:3:p:1349-1402.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().