More-than-Human Mediation: Social Scientists in the Making of Environmental AI Systems

What can social scientists contribute to the development of AI? To date, their efforts have primarily been viewed through the lens of AI's social consequences, such as offering legal and ethical guidelines and providing observation-based critiques. However, there is a growing demand for broader engagement of social scientists in AI research itself. Based on the experience of organizing and participating in two environmental AI projects, this paper aims to illuminate the unique challenges and opportunities for social scientists working with , rather than just for , engineers. Building on literature from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and anthropology on research collaboration, it shows that social scientists can take the role as mediators of AI development in three key ways: (1) connecting human and nonhuman actors across multiple disciplines and sources; (2) negotiating challenges posed by disciplinary differences and human-nonhuman distinctions; and (3) modulating the power dynamics between engineers and things in data production and interpretation. By doing so, this paper argues, social scientists can uncover the “more-than-human” dimension of AI development.