Marc Aidinoff
Areas of Research: History of Computing, Automation, and AI; Social Policy; Technology and Society; Science and Technology Studies; Historical Epistemology
Marc Aidinoff is a historian of science, technology, and the state, as well as a public policymaker.
An assistant professor in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University, Aidinoff researches the interplay between digital technologies and domestic policy in the United States. His forthcoming book, Rebooting Liberalism: The Computerization of the Social Contract, 1974-2004, historicizes seemingly bedrock principles of U.S. governance, including the social contract, by tracing the computerization of welfare administration. In Rebooting Liberalism, he examines the technological and policy work of liberals with a sharp focus on the Southern political context in which their ideas and practices developed. Across his scholarship Aidinoff seeks to recognize both the distinct contemporary reality and long historical trajectory of artificial intelligence and automated systems to structure daily life.
A strong believer in the value of historical inquiry and the insights of science studies both to analyze and to craft public policy, Aidinoff recently served as Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he helped lead a team of 150 policymakers on key initiatives including the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and guidance to ensure federally funded research is publicly accessible. Previously, Aidinoff served as a domestic policy advisor in the Obama Administration and a strategic consultant for political campaigns.
Aidinoff is an affiliate of the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and the Digital Due Process Clinic at Cornell University. His work has been supported by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the National Science Foundation, the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress, the Charles Babbage Institute, the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative, and others. His writing has appeared in Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals Since the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), First Monday, Internet Histories, The Washington Post, and Issues in Science and Technology. He is the co-author of Auditing AI (MIT Press, 2026) and the National Academy of Science’s Realizing the Promise and Minimizing the Perils of AI for Science and the Scientific Community (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).
Aidinoff completed his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.