Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life Volume 1

How AI is rewiring our social fabric--and how we can better shape our future.

The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It's embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we are, what we can do, and where we belong.

In Predicted, Mona Sloane offers a pragmatic framework for understanding these transformations around prediction, classification, and linearity, proposing that we think about AI as a social arrangement that we coproduce. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and real-world examples, this book invites us to see AI for what it is: deeply social, deeply political, and open to change. Clear-eyed and provocative, Predicted is a call to reclaim deliberations about progress and innovation as a public good and to ensure that the futures we chart are the ones we choose--together.

Author: Mona Sloane
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 05/12/2026
Pages: 242
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780520416345


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2026

About the Author
Sociologist Mona Sloane is Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She leads the Sloane Lab, convenes the Co-Opting AI public speaker series, and is Technology Editor at Public Books.