Artificial Intelligence Agents, Capital, and Symbolic Violence: Toward a Field Theory of AI in the Social Sciences
Keywords:
cultural capital, field theory, habitus, Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence, artificial intelligenceAbstract
AI agents intervene in decisions about work, schooling, credit and political communication, and they do so without appearing as participants at all. This article reads them through Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual apparatus. The argument is that these systems redistribute capital across the fields where they operate, and that they draw their authority from the very procedure that keeps their classificatory principle out of reach. Three lines of analysis are developed: AI agents as a form of institutionalized cultural capital that conceals its social origin; the uneven restructuring of the educational, financial, and political fields; and the technical habitus of developers as a source of symbolic violence. The article closes with a research program organized around the notion of the field theory of AI.
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