AI as Social Technology

The authors argue that current debates about AI are shaped by 1990s Singularity mythology rather than by the actual nature of large language models, which are better understood as "social technologies"—systematic means of reorganizing social relationships, comparable to markets, bureaucracies, and democracy. Drawing on Herbert Simon's sciences of the artificial, they contend that AI, like older institutions, works through lossy "coarse-grainings" of complex reality, and that its consequences will emerge from collisions with existing social systems rather than from omnipotent AGI. They call for collaboration between social scientists and computer scientists to map these interactions as they unfold.