Does AI Fit? Applying Social Actor Dimensions to AI

This paper applies one of the fundamental Social Informatics (SI) theories, the social actor approach, to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The paper builds upon the foundational scholarship of Lamb and Kling and reviews their proposed four dimensions of the social actor – Affiliations, Environments, Interactions, Identities – against the context of interviews with skilled trade workers and their perceptions of smart hand tools, which are hand tools that leverage embedded sensing, the internet of things, and edge AI. Our research reveals that the concept of social actors continues to be salient in the context of contemporary AI. We conclude that social actor theory has important implications for AI design.