Juan M. del Nido is an economist (BHons, Universidad del CEMA) and social anthropologist (MSc, University of Edinburgh; PhD, University of Manchester) researching ethical, political and economic reasoning around new technologies. His work on the Uber conflict in Buenos Aires, Argentina has been published by top peerreviewed journals in anthropology, awarded several prizes in the US and UK and is the basis of a forthcoming manuscript with Stanford University Press. Beyond academia, his work was recognised by the Argentine Council of Foreign Affairs and served as a basis for policy recommendations published by the Argentine Congress. Before entering the academic industry he worked as a political and economic consultant in Buenos Aires.

Career updates

2023 – present, Research Affiliate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge
2023 – present, Research Associate, Centro de Estudios en Tecnología y Sociedad (CETyS), Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina
2023 – present, tenure track Assistant Professor in Ethics and Technology, Business School, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT), Argentina

Research and Publications

After moving continents to start a permanent teaching position and a permanent research position, both here in Buenos Aires, I am now involved in two new research projects. At the CETyS I am co-director of a three-year long project into the use of generative AI (ChatGPT among others) in the judicial systems of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Argentina. This project has received funding from the Tinker Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and is a collaboration with the University of Buenos Aires’ IALab. The outcome will be a series of country reports on the state of AI regulation for judicial uses and a set of guidelines on the ethical use of these technologies in the context of justice provision and government services more broadly. I lead a second project, also at the CETyS, examining the prospecting among key stakeholders for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and the pushback in the current administration. This will be a four-year project, funded by the CETyS itself, and the goal is to analyse the tension between privacy and so-called “security” in the design and deployment of these currencies. This year my article “Platforms and the Social Imaginary of Ordinary Life” was published as part of an edited volume called The Economic Lives of Platforms, with Bristol University Press. I also published a long commentary of Daromir Rudnyckyj’s Econography in Current Anthropology. I am currently working on an article tentatively titled “Platforms, capitalism and ‘neoliberal’ communities” for an edited volume in the journal Platforms + Society.