Reimagining Sociological Paradigms in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Examining Theoretical Approaches and Conceptual Limitations

This research explores the need for a reimagined sociological framework to study the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern society. The field of AI research tends to focus on its technical and functional aspects, with some mention of the social consequences of artificial intelligence. However, despite efforts to address this problem, there is a significant conceptual deficit in understanding its social, cultural and political impact in a broader perspective. In the sociological study of artificial intelligence, it is still unclear what social really means and how it is transformed by the influence of artificial intelligence itself, in the context of a society driven by phenomena such as functional differentiation, Anthropocene and Technocene.

Starting from contemporary sociological theory and its efforts to develop a ‘Sociology of Artificial Intelligence’, this research analyses some of the main theoretical paradigms in the sociological study of artificial intelligence, such as Latour's Network Actor Theory, itself inspired by Simondon. The Social Systems theory developed by Luhmann and extended by Esposito. As well as the proposal for a systematic study of the ‘Habitus of Machines’ by Airoldi, influenced by Bourdieu. This with the aim of critically examining its limitations, its scope, and its blind spots, especially considering how the opposition between the artificial and the natural delimits the research and forces to rethink some of sociology's central ideas about human-machine interaction and the place of the human being in society.

Finally, a proposal is offered to think of the sociology of artificial intelligence as part of a broader field of study, which seeks to link the scientific and technical dimension of AI with more general considerations, such as the socio-political transformations, as well as the role of AI in the reconfiguration of societal values, political organisation and the normative frameworks through which society imagines itself.