artificial intelligence

A Social Science Perspective on Artificial Intelligence: Building Blocks for a Research Agenda

ABSTRACT

In this article, we discuss and outline a research agenda for social science research on artificial intelligence. We present four overlapping building blocks that we see as keys for developing a perspective on AI able to unpack the rich complexities of sociotechnical settings. First, the interaction between humans and machines must be studied in its broader societal context. Second, technological and human actors must be seen as social actors on equal terms. Third, we must consider the broader discursive settings in which AI is socially constructed as a phenomenon with related hopes and fears. Fourth, we argue that constant and critical reflection is needed over how AI, algorithms and datafication affect social science research objects and methods. This article serves as the introduction to this JDSR special issue about social science perspectives on AI.

Coproduction, Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: A Perspective from Cultural Anthropology

ABSTRACT

Over the past five years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been endorsed as the technical underpinning of innovation. Sensationalist representations of AI have also been accompanied by assumptions of technological determinism that distract from the ordinary, sometimes unassuming consequences of interaction with its systems and processes. Drawing on scholarship from cultural anthropology, along with science and technology studies (STS), this paper examines coproduction in a Canadian AI research and development context. Through interview responses and field observations it presents sites of sociotechnical entanglement and ethical discussion to highlight potential spaces of mediation for anthropological practice. Emerging themes from the experiences of AI specialists include the negotiability of technology, an ethics of the everyday and critical collaboration. Together this returns to an initial approach into a situated understanding of artificial intelligence, negotiating with broad, sensationalist perspectives and the more commonplace, backgrounded cases of narrow research.

What is Data and What Can It Be Used For? Key Questions in the Age of Burgeoning Data-Essentialism

ABSTRACT

In this article we describe the rise of a data orthodoxy that we suggest to label ‘data-essentialism’. We question this data-essentialism by problematizing its premises, and unveil its ideological indebtedness to deeper (previous) currents in Western thought and history. Data-essentialism is the assumption that data is the essence of basically everything, and thus provides the ideological underpinnings for the imagination of creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that would transform the human race and our existence. The imagination of data as an essence is in contrast to, while often conflated with, ideas of data as traces we leave behind existing in highly connected societies. This confusion over what data is, and can be used for, underlines the importance to engage in questions of the nature of data, whether everything in the universe can be described in terms of data and the implications of subscribing to such a data-essentialist worldview. We connect data- essentialism to a revival of positivism, critique a belief in the objectivity of data and that predictions based on data correlations can be fully accurate. We end the article with a discussion of how some aspects of AI rely on data- essentialist accounts and how these have a history and roots in Modernity.

Artificial Intelligence and Video Game Creation: A Framework for the New Logic of Autonomous Design

ABSTRACT

Autonomous, intelligent tools are reshaping all sorts of work practices, including innovative design work. These tools generate outcomes with little or no user intervention and produce designs of unprecedented complexity and originality, ushering profound changes to how organizations will design and innovate in future. In this paper, we formulate conceptual foundations to analyze the impact of autonomous design tools on design work. We proceed in two steps. First, we conceptualize autonomous design tools as ‘rational’ agents which will participate in the design process. We show that such agency can be realized through two separate approaches of information processing: symbolic and connectionist. Second, we adopt control theory to unpack the relationships between the autonomous design tools, human actors involved in the design, and the environment in which the tools operate. The proposed conceptual framework lays a foundation for studying the new kind of material agency of autonomous design tools in organizational contexts. We illustrate the analytical value of the proposed framework by drawing on two examples from the development of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands video game, which relied on such tools. We conclude this essay by constructing a tentative research agenda for the research into autonomous design tools and design work.