Hamid Reza Ekbia, born on 23 August 1955, is an Iranian American university professor at Syracuse University and director of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute at the Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.[1][2][3] He is the founding director of the Academic Alliance for AI Policy – a group of scholars and journalists who provide nonpartisan, interdisciplinary research, insights, and strategic analysis to inform and advise policymakers, media, and the public on issues of artificial intelligence governance.[4][5][6] In his director roles, he advocates for responsible AI regulatory policy.[7][8][9][10][11]
Ekbia's body of research is tied together by a focus on the complexly mediated relations between humans, computing technologies, and the socio-economic, cultural, and geopolitical forces that shape our world.[12][13] He has written on the political economy of computing, artificial intelligence, the future of work, and global development. In his book Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence (2008) he introduced the notion of the attribution fallacy—the propensity for human beings to over-attribute intelligence to artifacts in unwarranted ways, similar to how we anthropomorphize our pets, toys, or other objects and phenomena.[14] The term provides meaningful language to critique the overpromising, underdelivering nature of AI systems. His concept of heteromation accounts for transformations in the division of labor between humans and machines which have coincided with technological advances in recent decades. In his book Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism (2017) co-authored with Bonnie Nardi, he argues rather than simply automating tasks that were once performed by humans, digital technologies increasingly perform heteromation by pushing the workload of critical tasks onto end users, who come to act as indispensable mediators in processes of capitalist accumulation.[15]