In this episode of the Anthropology, AI, and the Future of Human Society podcast, Anthony Pickles discusses prediction markets, gambling, and politics. Anthony will be presenting the paper Pricing the future of politics: prediction markets, gambling, and the evacuation of causal narrative at the upcoming Anthropology, AI, and the Future of Human Society conference (June 6-10).

Anthony Pickles is a social anthropologist and lecturer in the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia. His published work has ranged from the theorization of transactions to the intersection of religion and corruption, from the transformative power of pockets to the colonial subjugation of counting systems. He is the author of Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town, and several articles on the anthropology of gambling. Anthony’s ISRF project marries his existing expertise in the study of gambling with his developing interest in global politics.

His current research project is on political gambling and prediction markets as capitalism-friendly technologies for capturing the future. The research is at an early stage and I have not drawn any conclusions.

Anthropology, AI and the Future of Human Society Conference.

AI has come to represent multiple causal drivers of change: amongst them artificial intelligence itself, space exploration, biotech, and other emerging technologies. The implications for human society could hardly be more significant and feed into a host of already contemporary concerns, such as sovereignty, economics, politics, reproduction and kinships, ethics and law, conflict, and many more.

The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI) is the world's longest-established scholarly association dedicated to the furtherance of anthropology (the study of humankind) in its broadest and most inclusive sense. The Institute is a non-profit-making registered charity and is entirely independent, with a Director and a small staff accountable to the Council, which in turn is elected annually from th...