Artificial Intelligence, Productive Forces, and the Common Prosperity of Humanity

Scope of the call

BRIQ: Belt & Road Initiative Quarterly is preparing a special issue on ‘Artificial Intelligence, Productive Forces, and the Common Prosperity of Humanity.’

At every major historical transformation, from the industrial revolutions to the digital turn, humanity has reconsidered the relationship between the development of productive forces and forms of social organisation. Artificial intelligence is now a central dimension of that relationship.

AI accelerates the processing of knowledge, affects decision-making, expands the scope of scientific research, and transforms production. It must therefore be discussed together with labour, ownership, planning, sovereignty, and social welfare. Its multifaceted effects on the workforce require particular attention.

The effects of robotisation on blue-collar labour and of generative AI and automation on white-collar cognitive labour can be examined together with unemployment, reskilling, the quality of work, labour-market polarisation, bargaining power, and the distribution of productivity gains.

The current development of AI also raises social, economic, and legal questions concerning the purposes and institutional settings in which technological capacities created through humanity’s common knowledge, publicly funded research, universities, open-data ecosystems, and social labour are used.

The decisive position of big technology companies calls for critical study of data ownership, infrastructure control, platform power, advertising, consumption steering, and digital surveillance. At the same time, AI’s potential public uses in health, education, transport, energy, disaster management, agricultural planning, industrial modernisation, and scientific discovery require investigation.

Experiences in China and other countries, where AI is applied to public services, industrial capacity, scientific research, production planning, and social needs, provide significant material for comparative analysis. AI also raises new questions about uneven development at the international level.

Differences in data, chips, computing infrastructure, researcher-training capacity, and industrial integration affect countries’ relative positions, forms of specialisation, and relations of technological dependency. AI should therefore be considered not only through market applications but also through public benefit, social development, and common prosperity.

AI also carries substantial transformative potential for science. Big-data analysis, modelling, simulation, materials science, biotechnology, drug development, climate research, and the basic sciences are gaining new possibilities, while method, verification, authorship, labour, originality, and research ethics are being reopened for debate.

The social purposes, forms of control, ethical and legal boundaries, and development perspectives governing AI are therefore crucial.

BRIQ welcomes critical, comparative, theoretical, and empirical studies on AI’s effects on productive forces, labour, social welfare, scientific production, public planning, international inequalities, and ethical governance.

Technological monopolisation, public alternatives, developing-country experiences, the transformation of labour, uneven development, and the relationship between scientific progress and social benefit are among the issue’s priority areas.