L'intelligence artificielle : une certaine intelligence du social

From the point of view of a sociology of knowledge, contemporary research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) draws its originality by its interest in the modeling of ordinary knowledge, that knowledge engaged in everyday life. The companies Facebook or Google, the so-called GAFAM, as well as online music and video services, capture and model the facts and gestures of the average person in order to put the results of their calculations back into play in its  very everyday life. The research in AI also deals with academic and professional knowledge as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, but this thesis will not focus on it.  Within the framework of a sociology of science and technology, I question what We, as the Western civilization, do with technological development, about the world we build with the help of various techniques. My concern is not with the choice of research objects privileged by public and private laboratories, but with the uses, the outlets according to the very general question: In what way does such a technique modify or not our way of living? Now, this question is an exercise in foresight insofar as we often do not have enough hindsight on these techniques. Nevertheless, it remains a background concern of my research. Indeed, would these machine learning models find their place in a civilization that would not give as much importance to efficiency, productivity, profitability, science or work? Also, do they endorse the established social organization, or do they offer new possibilities of existence? Understanding the artifact minimally from a technical perspective and grasping from a sociological point of view the way in which researchers think about their objects sheds light on the main categories of thought that guide these uses and, if applicable, on the possible societal effects. In this case, the idea of modeling many activities of daily life is based on an a priori representation of it by researchers who are socially situated by their profession. What is this representation and how is it operationalized in the models? Put differently, what relationships to the world do engineers and computer scientists have through their professional, academic and ordinary knowledge? Thus, in this thesis, my work comes down to informing the social dimension specific to the studied technique. Based on interviews with AI researchers, the question is as follows: What is the knowledge and reasoning of the researchers at the core of the algorithms of contemporary artificial intelligence and which build a specific operational representation of social life? Expressed in sociological terms, this question becomes: In what way are learning models a new "concrete model of knowledge" for users et researchers according to the concept developed by the sociologist Gilles Houles?  The so-called learning models underlie a relational constitution of human knowledge and of a relation to reality mediated by actions as a means of actualization of this knowledge. Summarized simply, the sociological concept of "concrete model of knowledge" objectifies the two modalities of existence of the human life that we find empirically under two computing concepts: symbolic (their mathematical model) and the “action” as "the computing agent" or "the one who acts", whether this concept is used or not by the researchers.  In sum, these models in relation to each other and materialized in the notorious connected or "smart" objects (e.g. telephones, household appliances) turn social life into a sociotechnical network. Its operational side relies on the position of "third-party intermediary" or "technical social memory" in human-human relations via machines. I will draw upon the concept of "social memory" and "social morphology" developed by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. In other words, this network of connected objects and human beings comes down to the establishment of a particular collective cognitive framework, stemming from the social representations of specific professional groups, but put into play in the everyday life of all, that is to say an institutionalization in progress. Indeed, the diffusion and adoption of the models stem from a process of public recognition of underlying and already institutionalized knowledge, essentially mathematics and engineering, the implicit knowledge of the "management sciences" and a knowledge called "scientific" by researchers. More precisely, the process underway consists in the institution of human beings and learning machines in permanent links via connected objects ("Internet of Things"). In the end, it consists in the networking of "social regularities" obtained by classifications and regressions carried out by the data's owners. I will speak of a "sociotechnical morphology" or a "sociotechnical configuration". The figure of the anthropomorphic multipurpose robot, which is supposed to condense all the practical application of knowledge on AI, is replaced by that of computerized social relations as places where links between human beings are maintained by a concentration of heterogeneous knowledge and ideas, such as a human being in need of help or the need for creativity, for example. In use, a type of social link between human beings via the machines is established, caught between the reduction proper to any modelling of the object on which it concerns, the flexibility offered by the possibility of adjustment (the "learning" side) and the meaning given to the action by the lambda user. Ideology as a "mode of knowledge" of the socio-technical network is part of this ongoing institutionalization. It offers a cognitive framework that challenges the diversity produced by the usual division of semantic labor within social groups by providing a model of legitimacy, namely the discourse of "sharing". The emphasis placed by this thesis on the "management sciences" and the notion of network places it in the continuity of the studies of the last thirty years on this "informational society" of Manuel Castells, a "new general representation of societies" into a network according to Luc Boltanski, or the "managerial spirit" which took hold of the State civil servants according to the sociologist Albert Ogien

Keyphrases: machine Learning, Network, Artificial intelligence, Social memory, Concrete model of knowledge, Model, Sharing economy, Ideology