We welcome ZENiT Research Fellow Tobias Tober to the Zukunftskolleg
Tobias Tober is one of our new ZENiT Research Fellows from the 1st call for applications for ZENiT Fellowships. He has started his fellowship in March and is affiliated with the Department of Politics and Public Administration as well as the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.
Tobias Tober completed the bachelor’s and master’s degree in Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz between 2009 and 2015. After a stint at Nuffield College in Oxford, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Geneva in February 2020 and worked as senior researchers at the LMU Munich until September 2020. Since October 2020, Tobias has returned to Konstanz joining the project “Digitalization, Automation and the Future of Work in Post-Industrial Welfare States” at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” as postdoctoral researcher. His research focuses on the political effects of structural transformations, such as Europeanization and technological change, and in particular how these structural changes affect the political economy of the welfare state.
His research project at the Zukunftskolleg is entitled “Rage against the Machine? The Distributional and Political Implications of Artificial Intelligence”. The project aims to address a question of great scientific and societal importance: What distributional effects will Artificial Intelligence (AI) have and how will individuals respond politically to them? To provide an answer, the projects intends to conduct an innovative online randomized control experiment that exposes respondents to AI and measures their AI-related attitudes and political preferences. To achieve this challenging task, Tobias has assembled a diverse research team of six exceptional international scholars from North American and European universities: Aina Gallego (Spanish Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona), Matthias Haslberger (German postdoctoral research at the University of St.\ Gallen), Thomas Kurer (Swiss Assistant Professor of “Politics and Inequality” at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich), Siegfried Manschein (Austrian PhD student at the European University Institute in Florence), Ravir Shir (Israeli postdoctoral researcher at the Data Science Institute of Columbia University in the City of New York), and Nicole Wu (Chinese Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto).
We wish him all the best for his project and for his time at the Zukunftskolleg!