The AI Blow-up. How the “Technology of the Future” turned into a political battleground
Until recently, AI was to be found everywhere except for political debates. Almost everyone agreed that AI was the key to future prosperity, and that a thriving society needed more of it. That has changed. These days, concerned citizens protest against data centres build-out. AI’s massive water and electricity footprint links tech policy to issues people worry about, like energy security, housing policy and climate change. AI-generated misinformation and slop disrupts elections, raising alarm. Algorithmic surveillance, too, is no longer a niche issue but one that more and more people push back against.
In this event, we trace AI’s journey from a topic for techies and technocrats to the centre of the political spotlight. Whence this shift during the past years? Will the push-back against AI-build-out and policy actually make a difference? And should we expect AI and tech more generally to remain high on the political agenda, or will it recede back into the realm of quiet politics? During this evening we explore different facets of how AI has become a political issue. Have we reached the moment at which society takes back control over tech? Or is that an illusion, given the complexity of the issue, the global reach of tech, and the enormous amounts of money at stake?
Speakers
Lisa Sophie Fenner is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam. Her research examines the role of civil society and social movements in shaping EU AI regulation. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Mechanisms of Protest Impact in the EU (Palgrave, 2026).
Elske van den Hoogen is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR). Her research explores how citizens make sense of European politics amid misinformation, democratic challenges, and changing media environments. Her work brings together research on euroscepticism, European elections, political disinformation, and AI in political communication.
Kimon Kieslich is a postdoctoral researcher in the programme group Communication, Organisations and Society at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR). His research focuses on the social and political implications of data-driven technologies, with a particular focus on AI ethics, public perceptions of algorithms, and the societal impacts of automated decision-making. In his research, he examines how these technologies are designed, governed, and experienced in practice, especially in contexts shaped by inequality and global power relations.
Théophile Lenoir is a postdoctoral researcher in the Research Priority Area AI & Politics at the University of Amsterdam and a Senior Fellow at the AI and Society Institute at Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. His work focuses on the political and environmental consequences of AI, studying how evidence about AI’s environmental footprint is produced and circulated. He has policy experience, including as co-lead of Luminate’s French Election Project and head of Institut Montaigne’s digital research programme.
Daniel Mügge (moderator) is Professor of Political Arithmetic at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He leads the NWO Vici project RegulAite that investigates EU governance of AI and how that links to global geopolitics and economic competition. At the UvA, he has co-founded the research priority area AI & Politics. Daniel has been a visiting researcher at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, the London School of Economics and the Freie Universität Berlin, his alma mater. His more recent research focuses on the governance of neurotechnologies.
