Abstract: Drawing on her new book Predicted (University of California Press, 2026), Mona Sloane will discuss how AI is best understood as a new type of social infrastructure, one that embeds prediction as a guiding principle of social organization by way of the “prediction paradigm”. Rather than treating AI’s impacts as downstream effects of engineering design, she traces how AI systems arise from—and in turn reorganize—social practices, institutional logics, and professional authority. At the heart of this project is the development of a sociology of AI, a project of building theory but even more so of active involvement. This sociology of AI demystifies AI and centers qualitative inquiry, institutional analysis, and public engagement to make visible the social arrangements that sustain the prediction paradigm and to reopen space for collective deliberation about alternative futures and forms of innovation.

The Dartmouth Autonomy Seminars explore how common principles of autonomy link fields such as robotics, economics, and cognition. It brings together academia and industry to discuss autonomous systems. More information can be found here: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/das/