Co-Opting AI: Taxes
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Sloane Lab, and the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia invite you to a new discussion in the series “Co-Opting AI.” This will be a completely virtual event.
Please register here.
This event will discuss AI, taxation and fair distribution vis-à-vis strategies for enhancing productivity and innovation.
Ruth Braunstein studies religion, politics, and money. She is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where she is Director of Undergraduate Studies. She also leads the Meanings of Democracy Lab, which explores the moral and cultural foundations of American democracy. She’s the host of When The Wolves Came: Evangelicals Resisting Extremism, a new documentary podcast spotlighting evangelical leaders who are resisting political extremism in their church and the country. Her upcoming book, My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America, delves into how paying taxes became a moral battleground in public life. She is also the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide and co-editor of Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories About Faith and Politics. Dr. Braunstein’s award-winning research has appeared in top scholarly journals and been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine. She also writes op-eds for publications including The Guardian, Religion News Service and The Conversation.
Ekkehard Ernst is Chief Macroeconomist at the International Labour Organization, where he is responsible for understanding the Future of Work and analysing alternative paths for jobs and earnings to improve upon current trends. For this he uses both scenario techniques and quantitative predictive tools to uncover hidden trends and challenges for policy makers and business. His work helps decision makers in understanding developments in skills and labour costs around the globe, providing them with the necessary intelligence to make effective long-term decisions. He is a regular speaker at international conferences where he presents his latest insights and organises a yearly summer academy together with the International Training Center in Turin, Italy, where he gives hands-on advice on the tools he is using. Before joining the ILO in 2008 he worked at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Central Bank. He has published extensively in the area of labour market trends and reforms and the impact of financial markets on jobs. Ekkehard Ernst has studied in Mannheim, Saarbrücken and Paris and holds a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Maximilian Kasy is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD at UC Berkeley and joined Oxford after appointments at UCLA and Harvard University. His research interests focus on social foundations for statistics and machine learning, going beyond traditional single-agent decision theory. He also works on economic inequality, job guarantee programs, and basic income. He teaches a course on foundations of machine learning at the economics department at Oxford. In fall 2025, his book “The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits)” will be published by University of Chicago Press.
Mona Sloane is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA). As a sociologist, she studies the intersection of technology and society, specifically in the context of AI design, use, and policy. She also convenes the Co-Opting AI series and serves as the editor of the Co-Opting AI book series at the University of California Press as well as the Technology Editor for Public Books. At UVA, Mona runs Sloane Lab which conducts empirical research on the implications of technology for the organization of social life. Its focus lies on AI as a social phenomenon that intersects with wider cultural, economic, material, and political conditions. The lab spearheads social science leadership in applied work on responsible AI, public scholarship, and technology policy. More here: monasloane.org.
The Co-Opting AI event series is convened by Mona Sloane. It is hosted by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, UVA’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, and Sloane Lab.