From Interaction to Transformaction: The Consequences of Artificial Intelligence for Theories of Social Action

From a social science perspective, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is twofold: firstly, it describes a technology that forms an infrastructure of knowledge production and evaluation. Secondly, it performs as part of language bots meaningful social communicative interactions. On the one hand, AI performs actions without human guidance and interventions, and on the other hand, AI is an infrastructure for meaningful knowledge production, evaluations, and archiving. Knowledge is produced by input data from sensors, actuators, or global platforms, which provide a space to process human communication and interaction. Platform infrastructures constitute meaning-oriented interaction programs and social relationships on a large scale. AI thus becomes a co-interactor alongside other human interactors and co-constitutes social meaning-making on a large scale. This second aspect, the co-interactivity of AI, challenges our conventional theoretical concepts of social interaction. The following essay aims to reconsider these new challenges by relating them to approaches close to actor-network theory. As a result, the essay proposes to understand the positions of AI in social action processes by introducing a new theoretical concept: instead of speaking of social interaction that covers only humans, we should rather speak of social transformaction. AI does not just interact with humans; it alters human concepts of actions and interactions altogether.