With AI, It Seems a Fact: Things Act Back

Abstract

This editorial opens the Spring issue of the Journal of Business Anthropology. The issue consists of a collection of nine themed essays on artificial intelligence (AI) and business anthropology, edited by Matt Artz and Adam Gamwell, who have also written an introduction to the collection. In this editorial, we do not, therefore, summarize each essay and the insights of the collection, as we would usually do. For such a summary, please read the introduction by Artz and Gamwell. Instead, we offer a few thoughts on one of the core themes that runs through all the essays and, more generally, seems to be a defining feature of AI: namely, that AI appears to have finally made it an indisputable fact that things act back, being responsive in and through their relations and interactions with humans – an issue that has been explored and discussed extensively among anthropologists and other social and human scientists in the recent decades.