Artificial Intelligence – “AI” – continues to be the subject of hot debate around the world as governments seek ways to regulate it to protect the public, and developers continue to push towards AI with more human-like capabilities. What’s at stake depends on who you listen to: some extoll the benefits of AI to “transform” the way we live and work, downplaying the potential for negative impacts on society, while others warn of an existential threat to humanity.  Most perspectives land somewhere in between. We see AI, like other technological advances before it, as an exciting tool with tremendous potential. As such, it is not inherently helpful or harmful: its impacts depend on how it is used. Now is the perfect time for the thoughtful and extensive integration of social science evidence and expertise into AI development, deployment, implementation, and use so that AI can be optimally, positively effective while minimizing risks of harm to society.

AI has existed in various forms for decades and until recently, was developed under tightly constrained parameters to do specific tasks. However, the 2022 launch of easy-to-access Large Language Model (LLM) tools such as ChatGPT, which input massive amounts of data and generate responses to questions in conversational language, had leaders across many sectors – from education to business – scrambling to set guidelines and parameters for AI’s use in their domains. Indeed, AI and other technologies are not typically implemented in isolation but in systems. Social science approaches can help us understand and address these technologies’ reach, implications, and impact within these “AI systems.”

For those reading nearly any media outlet during 2023, it is hard to miss the fact that Artificial Intelligence (AI)–in all its varied manifestations–is a regularized component of public discussion and debate. The celebrated and feared emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022, the Writers Guild of America strike and the concerns that writing would cease to be a human endeavor, and the recent firing and subsequent rehiring of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clearly illustrate that AI is having a moment. So much so that prediction and forecasting site Metaculus is tracking to see if Time's person of the year for 2023 will be AI. Honestly, it is hard to argue against this idea. But before we get too far down a path of contending and arguing that an AI revolution will fundamentally transform the world in which we live, perhaps we should consider what social science can tell us and has told us about the longitudinal impacts of technological change on society. The interdisciplinary world of Science & Technology Studies can provide a window into how new and emerging technologies impact how we live on the planet.

Science & Technology Studies as a field of inquiry that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, bringing together those interested and invested in better understanding the ways science and technology impacted society. Situated within broader discussions about science "and" society, and science "for" society, early work–exemplified by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions–aimed to reveal the deep social roots of scientific discovery and technological innovation.