The Inner World of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Elham Bahmanteymouri, Mohsen Mohammadzadeh, and Fabio Morreale, offers a critical and interdisciplinary exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the contemporary world. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars from planning, engineering, economics, philosophy, computer science, and media studies, the book examines the hidden infrastructures, political economies, and spatial imaginaries that underpin AI. It invites readers to look beyond technical narratives, uncovering how AI operates as both a transformative technology and a socio-political force.

Structured around three interconnected sections – Hidden and Subsumed Humans in AI, Political Economies and Fantasies of AI, and AI, Urban Knowledge, and the Repressed Real – the volume explores how AI functions simultaneously as technology, ideology, and social relation. Contributors reveal how intelligent systems mediate labour, governance, and everyday life, exposing both the promises and contradictions of automation and digitalisation. The book also analyses AI’s entanglements with global urbanisation, environmental change, and shifting power relations across regions, including the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas.

Offering a critical yet accessible perspective, The Inner World of Artificial Intelligence serves as an invaluable reference for academics, professionals, and policymakers interested in understanding AI’s technical, social, spatial, and ethical implications. It will appeal to readers in planning, economics, political science, engineering, and the social sciences who seek to navigate and shape the complex human–AI relationship in an age of accelerating technological transformation.