The Routledge Social Science Handbook of AI


Book Description

The Routledge Social Science Handbook of AI is a landmark volume providing students and teachers with a comprehensive and accessible guide to the major topics and trends of research in the social sciences of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as surveying how the digital revolution – from supercomputers and social media to advanced automation and robotics – is transforming society, culture, politics and economy. The Handbook provides representative coverage of the full range of social science engagements with the AI revolution, from employment and jobs to education and new digital skills to automated technologies of military warfare and the future of ethics. The reference work is introduced by editor Anthony Elliott, who addresses the question of relationship of social sciences to artificial intelligence, and who surveys various convergences and divergences between contemporary social theory and the digital revolution. The Handbook is exceptionally wide-ranging in span, covering topics all the way from AI technologies in everyday life to single-purpose robots throughout home and work life, and from the mainstreaming of human-machine interfaces to the latest advances in AI, such as the ability to mimic (and improve on) many aspects of human brain function. A unique integration of social science on the one hand and new technologies of artificial intelligence on the other, this Handbook offers readers new ways of understanding the rise of AI and its associated global transformations. Written in a clear and direct style, the Handbook will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience.




Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 1


Book Description

The Handbook of Computational Social Science is a comprehensive reference source for scholars across multiple disciplines. It outlines key debates in the field, showcasing novel statistical modeling and machine learning methods, and draws from specific case studies to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges in CSS approaches. The Handbook is divided into two volumes written by outstanding, internationally renowned scholars in the field. This first volume focuses on the scope of computational social science, ethics, and case studies. It covers a range of key issues, including open science, formal modeling, and the social and behavioral sciences. This volume explores major debates, introduces digital trace data, reviews the changing survey landscape, and presents novel examples of computational social science research on sensing social interaction, social robots, bots, sentiment, manipulation, and extremism in social media. The volume not only makes major contributions to the consolidation of this growing research field but also encourages growth in new directions. With its broad coverage of perspectives (theoretical, methodological, computational), international scope, and interdisciplinary approach, this important resource is integral reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers engaging with computational methods across the social sciences, as well as those within the scientifi c and engineering sectors.




Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 2


Book Description

The Handbook of Computational Social Science is a comprehensive reference source for scholars across multiple disciplines. It outlines key debates in the field, showcasing novel statistical modeling and machine learning methods, and draws from specific case studies to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges in CSS approaches. The Handbook is divided into two volumes written by outstanding, internationally renowned scholars in the field. This second volume focuses on foundations and advances in data science, statistical modeling, and machine learning. It covers a range of key issues, including the management of big data in terms of record linkage, streaming, and missing data. Machine learning, agent-based and statistical modeling, as well as data quality in relation to digital trace and textual data, as well as probability, non-probability, and crowdsourced samples represent further foci. The volume not only makes major contributions to the consolidation of this growing research field, but also encourages growth into new directions. With its broad coverage of perspectives (theoretical, methodological, computational), international scope, and interdisciplinary approach, this important resource is integral reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers engaging with computational methods across the social sciences, as well as those within the scientific and engineering sectors.




The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies


Book Description

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies examines the relationship of the social sciences to artificial intelligence, surveying the various convergences and divergences between science and technology studies on the one hand and identity transformations on the other. It provides representative coverage of all aspects of the AI revolution, from employment to education to military warfare, impacts on public policy and governance and the future of ethics. How is AI currently transforming social, economic, cultural and psychological processes? This handbook answers these questions by looking at recent developments in supercomputing, deep learning and neural networks, including such topics as AI mobile technology, social robotics, big data and digital research. It focuses especially on mechanisms of identity by defining AI as a new context for self-exploration and social relations and analyzing phenomena such as race, ethnicity and gender politics in human-machine interfaces.




Handbook on the Sociology of Health and Medicine


Book Description

This timely Handbook provides an essential guide to the major topics, perspectives, and scholars in the sociology of health and medicine. Contributors prove the immense value of a sociological understanding of central health and medical concerns, including public health, the COVID-19 pandemic, and new medical technologies.




Algorithms of Anxiety


Book Description

Machine learning algorithms are widely presumed to herald a world in which the crippling burdens of anxiety can be left behind. The digital revolution promises a brave new world where individuals, communities and organizations can at last take control of the future – anticipating, designing and commanding the future, possibly even with mathematical exactitude. Yet, paradoxically, algorithms have unleashed widespread fears and forebodings about the impact of digital technologies. Whether it’s worries about unemployment, distress about social media’s harmful effects on teenagers, or the fear of intrusive digital surveillance, we live in an age of turbo-charged anxiety where the prophecies of algorithms are increasingly enmeshed with fundamental disruption and anxieties about the future. In this book, Anthony Elliott examines how machine learning algorithms are not only transforming global institutions but also rewriting our personal lives. He tells this story through a wide-ranging analysis which takes in ChatGPT, Amazon, the Metaverse, Martin Ford, Netflix, Uber, Bernard Stiegler, Squid Game, Kate Crawford, LaMDA, Byung-Chul Han, autonomous drones, Jean Baudrillard and the automation of warfare. Questioning why people often assume that they need to adopt new technologies in order to lead fulfilling lives, Elliott argues that people may be as much entranced as inspired by their outsourcing of personal decision-making to smart machines.




Foundations of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics


Book Description

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a complicated science that combines philosophy, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, mathematics and logic (logicism), economics, computer science, computability, and software. Meanwhile, robotics is an engineering field that compliments AI. There can be situations where AI can function without a robot (e.g., Turing Test) and robotics without AI (e.g., teleoperation), but in many cases, each technology requires each other to exhibit a complete system: having "smart" robots and AI being able to control its interactions (i.e., effectors) with its environment. This book provides a complete history of computing, AI, and robotics from its early development to state‐of‐the‐art technology, providing a roadmap of these complicated and constantly evolving subjects. Divided into two volumes covering the progress of symbolic logic and the explosion in learning/deep learning in natural language and perception, this first volume investigates the coming together of AI (the mind) and robotics (the body), and discusses the state of AI today. Key Features: Provides a complete overview of the topic of AI, starting with philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and logicism, and extending to the action of the robots and AI needed for a futuristic society Provides a holistic view of AI, and touches on all the misconceptions and tangents to the technologies through taking a systematic approach Provides a glossary of terms, list of notable people, and extensive references Provides the interconnections and history of the progress of technology for over 100 years as both the hardware (Moore’s Law, GPUs) and software, i.e., generative AI, have advanced Intended as a complete reference, this book is useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students of computing, as well as the general reader. It can also be used as a textbook by course convenors. If you only had one book on AI and robotics, this set would be the first reference to acquire and learn about the theory and practice.




Routledge Handbook of Social Futures


Book Description

Featuring chapters from an international range of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook provides a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on contemporary futures studies. Engaging with key defining questions of the early twenty-first century such as climate change, big data, AI, the future of economics, education, mental health, cities and more, the Handbook provides a review and synthesis of futures scholarship, highlighting the role that societies can and should play in their making. While the various chapters demonstrate how futures emerge and take shape in particular places at particular times, the distinctive insight provided by the volume overall is that futures thinking today must be social and contextual. By presenting a range of futures work from contexts around the globe, the Handbook contextualizes techniques – forecasting, backcasting, scenario planning, collaboration and co-production– to ask how different dimensions of the social are created and circulated in the process. Through its thirty chapters, the volume explores and interrogates narratives, anticipations, enactments, ecologies, collaborations, prospections and so on to highlight which versions of the social are legitimized and which are encouraged and foreclosed. This Handbook opens an important conversation about the centrality of the social in futures thinking. By bringing arts, humanities and social sciences scholars and practitioners into conversation with biologists, environmental, climate and computer scientists, this volume seeks to encourage new pathways across, between and within multiple disciplines to interrogate the futures we need and want. The social must be our starting point if we are to steer our planet in a direction that supports good lives for the many, everywhere.




The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information


Book Description

Information and communication technology occupies a central place in the modern world, with society becoming increasingly dependent on it every day. It is therefore unsurprising that it has become a growing subject area in contemporary philosophy, which relies heavily on informational concepts. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information is an outstanding reference source to the key topics and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into four parts: basic ideas quantitative and formal aspects natural and physical aspects human and semantic aspects. Within these sections central issues are examined, including probability, the logic of information, informational metaphysics, the philosophy of data and evidence, and the epistemic value of information. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, computer science and communication studies.




Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies


Book Description

Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science has played the role of muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) as the interdisciplinary exploration of art–science. This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge- making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world. This handbook provides scholars and practitioners already familiar with the themes and tensions of art–science with a means of connecting across disciplines. It proposes organizing principles for thinking about art–science across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Encounters with art and science become meaningful in relation to practices and materials manifest as perceptual habits, background knowledge, and cultural norms. As the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, a variety of STS tools can be brought to bear on art–science so that systematic research can be conducted on this unique set of knowledge-making practices.