University of Oxford
Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative Oxford Martin School
Centre for Technology and Society (CTS)
Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative · University of Oxford

Centre for Technology and Society

Emerging technologies are reshaping work and redistributing influence 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 benefits society broadly and leaves power widely held — rather than concentrating it and deepening the inequalities we already have.

Our research About the Centre
About the Centre

Understanding how emerging technologies change societies

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.

Research

Key research themes

Within a broad agenda, the Centre concentrates its effort where the evidence is thinnest and the stakes are highest.

Primary interest — I

AI, inequality, and the distribution of power

How these technologies concentrate or disperse economic and political influence among states, firms, and citizens — and whether a wide range of actors keeps a meaningful say, or advantage accumulates with those who already hold it.

  • Do they hand governments and a few dominant firms new instruments of surveillance and control?
  • Does unequal access to frontier AI — between citizens, and between rich and developing economies — become unequal influence over public decisions?
  • Or can institutional design — oversight, transparency, and cooperation across borders — keep influence widely shared?
From the Working Paper Series
Primary interest — II

The labour market implications of AI

How AI adoption is reshaping work, skills, and wages — and how firms, workers, and labour institutions are adapting. Unlike earlier automation that absorbed routine tasks, whether manual or clerical, AI reaches into non-routine cognitive and professional work, where the scope for adjustment is untested.

  • Which tasks are being automated, and which augmented rather than replaced?
  • Where do the productivity gains accrue: to firms, to capital, or to workers themselves?
  • Who bears the costs of adjustment, and do they fall hardest on women and younger workers?
From the Working Paper Series
Primary interest — III

Supply chains, reshoring, and industrial policy

Countries including the United States and the United Kingdom are trying to bring production home. China, like the East Asian tigers before it, built capability to embed itself in global supply chains rather than wait for static comparative advantage. How industrial policy can be designed to shape where production settles is an open question.

  • Which industries can a country realistically build or rebuild, and what capabilities have to exist first?
  • How do reshoring, nearshoring, and ally-shoring differ in cost, resilience, and political durability?
  • Where does emerging robotics make domestic production viable, and where do technological limits still bind?
From the Working Paper Series
Working Paper Series

New research, circulated early

The CTS Working Paper Series puts our research into circulation ahead of publication, so findings can inform debate while it is still live.

WP 2026-03 · October 2026

Did US Worker Retraining Reduce Participant Automation Exposure?

Julian Jacobs · Jordan Canedy

WP 2026-02 · August 2026

Tariffs, Geoeconomics and Political Cleavages: Evidence from American High-Tech Firms

Phuong Pham · Randall Stone

Browse the series

Other themes of interest
Equitable access Systemic bias Privacy Artificial intelligence Biotechnology Blockchain Quantum computing Governance mechanisms
Activities

What the Centre does

Impactful research

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.

Policy and public engagement

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.

Supporting future leaders

Developing the next generation of technology governance leaders through mentoring and research opportunities for scholars at every career stage.

News & commentary

News from the Centre

Announcements, appointments, events, and writing for policy and public audiences from across the Centre and its affiliates.

  • Working paper

    Does worker retraining protect against automation?

    Julian JacobsCTS Doctoral Affiliate and Jordan Canedy · CTS Working Paper 2026-03

    As AI raises fresh concerns about job displacement, retraining is often proposed as the answer. In Did US Worker Retraining Reduce Participant Automation Exposure?, Jacobs and Canedy test that idea using over 23 million records from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the main public funder of retraining in the United States. They find that participants rarely move into jobs less exposed to automation, and most return to their previous field. Where outcomes improve, it is mainly because wages recover, not because people change occupation. Employer-led apprenticeships do best.

    Read the working paper →
  • Commentary

    What can physical AI actually do on the factory floor?

    Will SentanceCTS Visiting Professor · LinkedIn

    After visiting a new deployment and IMTS in Chicago — the largest manufacturing technology show in North America — Professor Sentance asks what physical AI can really do in a factory. A century of process engineering has been about removing variation, he argues, so AI’s great strength — adapting to the unfamiliar — adds little to today’s linear production lines. The real opportunity lies in the adaptive, non-linear processes that manufacturers abandoned because they were too unpredictable to manage or too dangerous for people.

    Read the post on LinkedIn →
  • Paper

    Finding causal relationships in incomplete data

    Thomas RobinsonCTS Faculty Affiliate and Ranjit LallCTS Director · NeurIPS 2026

    In “PAIR-CI: Calibrated Conditional Independence Testing for Causal Discovery with Incomplete Data”, Robinson and Lall introduce a machine learning method for uncovering causal relationships in data with missing values — a pervasive problem in the surveys, firm records, and cross-national datasets that social scientists rely on. Where existing approaches can mistake gaps in the data for genuine causal links, the new method keeps such false discoveries rare. The paper will appear at NeurIPS 2026, the premier venue for research in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

    Read the preprint on arXiv →

All news and commentary →

People

Who we are

Portrait of Ranjit Lall

Ranjit Lall

Director

Professor of International Political Economy, University of Oxford

Portrait of Robert Trager

Robert Trager

Faculty Affiliate

Co-Director, Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, University of Oxford

Portrait of Maike Osborne

Maike Osborne

Faculty Affiliate

Co-Director, Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, University of Oxford

Portrait of Aarushi Kalra

Aarushi Kalra

Faculty Affiliate

Associate Professor of Economics, University of Oxford

Portrait of Thomas Robinson

Thomas Robinson

Faculty Affiliate

Assistant Professor in Methodology, London School of Economics

Portrait of Will Sentance

Will Sentance

Visiting Professor

CEO, Standard Matter · Founder, Codesmith

Portrait of Rahul Prabhakar

Rahul Prabhakar

Visiting Professor

Compliance Principal, Amazon Web Services

Portrait of Conor Black

Conor Black

Research Fellow

Architect and Design Computation Specialist, HOK

Portrait of Fatih Aydin

Fatih Aydin

Fellow

Founder, ARA · Practitioner Associate, University of Oxford

Portrait of Walter Mattli

Walter Mattli

Advisor

Professor and Supernumerary Fellow, St John's College, Oxford

Portrait of Duoduo Li

Duoduo Li

Research & Partnerships

MPhil graduate in Social Anthropology, University of Oxford

Portrait of Phuong Pham

Phuong Pham

Doctoral Affiliate

PhD student in Political Science, University of Rochester

Portrait of Julian Jacobs

Julian Jacobs

Doctoral Affiliate

Research Scientist, Google DeepMind · DPhil candidate, University of Oxford

Portrait of Conrad Kunadu

Conrad Kunadu

Doctoral Affiliate

DPhil candidate in International Relations, University of Oxford

Portrait of Ahmet Ergurum

Ahmet Ergurum

Doctoral Affiliate

PhD candidate in Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Interested in becoming a CTS affiliate? Get in touch →

Hosted by the Centre

The Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professorship

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.

About the Professorship

Professor Sanjaya Lall
Professor Sanjaya Lall (1940–2005)

Robert Wade · Dani Rodrik · Paul Krugman · Abhijit Banerjee · Avinash Dixit · Kenneth Rogoff · Esther Duflo · Joseph Stiglitz · Raj Chetty · Daron Acemoglu · Rohini Pande · Sendhil Mullainathan

Support the Centre

Evidence takes investment

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:

  • Funding research projects on the labour market and power effects of AI
  • Endowing researcher posts and early-career fellowships
  • Sponsoring workshops and public forums open to the wider community
  • Supporting policy translation that connects findings to live debates
Contact

Get in touch

We welcome enquiries from researchers, journalists, policymakers, and prospective collaborators and funders. Researchers and practitioners interested in an affiliation with the Centre, or in contributing a working paper or shorter piece, are encouraged to get in touch directly.

Ranjit Lall

Director, CTS · Professor of International Political Economy

ranjit.lall@politics.ox.ac.uk →
A centre of the