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How AI is rewiring our social fabric—and how we can better shape our future.
The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It's embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we are, what we can do, and where we belong.
In Predicted, Mona Sloane offers a pragmatic framework for understanding these transformations around prediction, classification, and linearity, proposing that we think about AI as a social arrangement that we coproduce. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and real-world examples, this book invites us to see AI for what it is: deeply social, deeply political, and open to change. Clear-eyed and provocative, Predicted is a call to reclaim deliberations about progress and innovation as a public good and to ensure that the futures we chart are the ones we choose—together.
"A must-read for students and general readers alike. Mona Sloane provides a terrific guided tour of AI as a technology along with a compelling new framework for understanding its appeal as a social infrastructure. A real contribution."—Allison Pugh, author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World
"A cautionary tale about the social factors that shape AI and, in turn, the societies that have embraced it, written by one of the rising stars in the field. An important, even necessary book."—Eric Klinenberg, author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed
"Locating the prediction paradigm as fundamental to the artificial intelligence project, Sloane provides a technically informed, clear account of the assumptions and operations that treat occurrences of correlation as signs of causation."—Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions
"Sloane brings a calm, clear perspective to the often panicked and hyperbolic discussions of AI. In Predicted, she shows how AI remakes the very infrastructure of society. While AI mediation is ubiquitous and central to a new system based on prediction, anticipation, and instant response, Sloane reminds us that AI is only real because we make it so, and we have the capacity to change it."—Craig Calhoun, coauthor of Degenerations of Democracy