It’s not the rise of intelligent machines that concerns University of Virginia sociologist Mona Sloane . It’s the subtle yet powerful move toward prediction as a means of organizing society — a paradigm shift that she says leaves little room for other possible futures.
In her first book, “ Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life ,” Sloane issues a warning call around this phenomenon, which she calls the prediction paradigm, suggesting that we take ownership over AI to proactively shape the future.
Sloane says she was motivated to write “Predicted” because so much of the discourse she encountered about AI was wrapped up in either doom or boom, rather than providing a more sober analysis of what AI actually is. “I wanted to give people the power to imagine and enact great futures with AI and to understand it as a form of infrastructure that should be collectively governed,” she said.
Sloane argues that the social infrastructure that AI has become changes the way we socially relate to one another, whether we are aware of it or not.
An assistant professor with dual appointments in media studies and data science, Sloane studies the intersection of artificial intelligence and society, specifically relating to AI design, use, and policy. She also leads the Co-Opting AI series , a public speaker series about how we use AI.
She hopes that “Predicted” will help people think of AI as a social phenomenon that they themselves can shape, rather than something that happens to them. “AI is not a magical force or an inevitable phenomenon but a deliberate social arrangement that embeds the logic of prediction into the infrastructure of everyday life — and because AI is only real because we make it so, we have the power to shape what it becomes.”
Sloane’s book was published by University of California Press on May 12 and is available at all major book retailers.