Emerging technologies are reshaping work and reordering political authority faster than our understanding of them can keep up. The CTS closes that gap with rigorous, evidence-first research, helping to ensure that technological change strengthens democratic institutions and benefits society as a whole — rather than concentrating power and deepening the inequalities we already have.
The Centre for Technology and Society (CTS) aims to understand how emerging technologies — from artificial intelligence and biotechnology to blockchain and quantum computing — are transforming societies around the world.
We seek to identify the social, economic, and political consequences of new technologies, both within individual societies and globally: disparities in access to and benefit from them, the potential for new forms of inequality, and the governance mechanisms that may mitigate or worsen these effects.
Our distinctive contribution is empirical. Debate about technology and society is rich in speculation and thin on evidence. The CTS combines the empirical social sciences with computational and data science to establish how these technologies are actually reshaping economies and societies — not how they might, in principle, do so.
The Centre sits within the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative (AIGI) at the University of Oxford and is supported by the Sanjaya Lall Memorial Fund. It also hosts the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professorship of Business and Development, one of the most prestigious visiting appointments in economics.
Within a broad agenda, the Centre concentrates its effort where the evidence is thinnest and the stakes are highest.
How AI adoption is reshaping work, skills, wages, and job displacement — and how firms, workers, and labour institutions are adapting to it.
How these technologies concentrate or disperse political and economic power among states, firms, and citizens — and what institutional design can do to keep authority accountable and contestable rather than allowing it to consolidate unchecked.
Commissioning and running interdisciplinary projects on our core themes, hosting visiting researchers, and creating opportunities for early-career scholars. Outputs range from academic publications to policy reports and briefings written for non-specialists.
Lectures, workshops, and public forums on questions of broad interest. The Centre serves as a non-partisan source of evidence and analysis for policymakers, industry, and civil society working to mitigate AI's challenges and realise its benefits.
Developing the next generation of technology governance leaders through mentoring and research opportunities for scholars at every career stage.
Announcements, appointments, events, and writing for policy and public audiences from across the Centre and its affiliates.
Advanced semiconductors cannot be made by any one country. Design software is American, lithography machines Dutch, optics German, photoresists Japanese, fabrication Taiwanese — and remove any node and the chain breaks. Pham and Scholten argue that this structure, not Taiwan's foundries alone, is what deters conflict in the Taiwan Strait, because a chip fab seized by force produces nothing without the network behind it. The uncomfortable implication is that export controls and reshoring, each sensible in isolation, are steadily dismantling the interdependence that keeps the peace.
Read at War on the Rocks →
Director
Professor of International Political Economy, University of Oxford
Faculty Affiliate
Co-Director, Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative
Faculty Affiliate
Co-Director, Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative
Faculty Affiliate
Associate Professor of Economics, University of Oxford
Faculty Affiliate
Assistant Professor in Methodology, London School of Economics
Advisor
Supernumerary Fellow, St John's College, University of Oxford
Rahul Prabhakar
Visiting Fellow
Compliance Principal, Amazon Web Services
Research Fellow
CEO, Standard Matter · Founder, Codesmith
Conor Black
Research Fellow
Architect and Design Computation Specialist, HOK
Phuong Pham
Doctoral Affiliate
PhD student in Political Science, University of Rochester
Each year the Centre hosts the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professorship of Business and Development — one of the most prestigious visiting appointments in economics, held by Nobel laureates and Clark Medallists since 2011.
Robert Wade · Dani Rodrik · Paul Krugman · Abhijit Banerjee · Avinash Dixit · Kenneth Rogoff · Esther Duflo · Joseph Stiglitz · Raj Chetty · Daron Acemoglu · Rohini Pande · Sendhil Mullainathan
Debate about technology's social effects is abundant. Reliable evidence about them is scarce — and building it is slower, harder, and less glamorous work.
The Centre is supported by the Sanjaya Lall Memorial Fund, which also endows the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professorship. We welcome conversations with individuals, foundations, and organisations who share our commitment to rigorous, independent research.
Areas of particular interest:
We welcome enquiries from researchers, journalists, policymakers, and prospective collaborators and funders.
Ranjit Lall
Director, CTS · Professor of International Political Economy
ranjit.lall@politics.ox.ac.uk →
