Predicted - (Co-Opting AI) by Mona Sloane (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How AI is rewiring our social fabric--and how to 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 we rethink AI as a social arrangement that we coproduce. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and real-world examples, this book invites readers 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.

From the Back Cover

"A must-read for students and general readers alike. Mona Sloane provides both a terrific guided tour of AI as a technology along with a compelling new framework for understanding the appeal of AI as a social infrastructure. A real contribution." --Allison Pugh, author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World

About the Author

Mona Sloane is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She leads the Sloane Lab, convenes the Co-Opting AI public speaker series, and is Technology Editor at Public Books.