Artificial intelligence as synthetic social capital: A research agenda for rural sociology

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) have the potential to transform rural communities, regional development, and urban–rural relations. As active entities that redistribute agency among humans and machines, AI and related technologies will shape how people, institutions, and machines interact and influence rural futures. Drawing on classical sociological theory and contemporary debates, LLMs are conceptualized as a form of synthetic social capital, offering rural residents access to the vast reservoir of global human knowledge while simultaneously threatening to erode tacit expertise and local cultural systems. It is important to monitor and evaluate the impact of AI in general and LLMs in particular on all aspects of rural life, including but not limited to rural labor markets, service provision and municipal capacity, the value and circulation of knowledge, social relations, cohesion, and cultural life, and sustainability and justice in resource use. These dynamics place AI at the center of struggles between empowerment and exclusion, peripherality and connection, surveillance and solidarity. The imagined utopias and dystopias of AI futures are not technological inevitabilities but may help us focus on alternative futures that must be actively imagined, debated, and pursued. This is a preprint which has not undergone peer review. A revised version is intended for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.