AI as a Threefold Challenge for Social Science: Theory, Object, and Tool
By
Alondra Nelson
Crisp on the outside, thoughtful on the inside. A keeper.
Summary
This essay argues that advanced artificial intelligence—including generative models, algorithmic tools, and agentic systems—poses three interrelated imperatives for social science: (1) renewed attention to social theories of how technology, human experience, and social order are entangled; (2) study of AI as objects of inquiry in their own right; and (3) recognition that AI offers capabilities that may transform the practice of social investigation itself. Drawing on thinkers from Weber to Du Bois to contemporary scholarship on algorithmic governance, the essay examines what social science distinctively offers: the capacity to historicize the unprecedented, trace connections across scales, and center those most affected by technological change. It identifies how algorithmic systems are remaking the distribution of opportunity and risk as a central task of social inquiry.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledThe emergence of advanced artificial intelligence...has become a touchstone for contemporary debates about society.
These technologies arrive with promises to enhance human capacities, accelerate scientific discovery, and generate new cultural forms.
AI models, tools, and systems pose three interrelated imperatives for social science: they demand renewed attention to social theories...they require study as objects of inquiry in their own right; and they offer capabilities that may transform—or upend—the practice of social investigation itself.
The essay examines what social science distinctively offers: the capacity to historicize the apparently unprecedented, to trace connections across scales, and to center those most affected by technological change.
It identifies how algorithmic systems are remaking the distribution of opportunity and risk as a central task of social inquiry.
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