This article explores the sociology of artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on interactions between social actors and technological processes. The aim is to locate social actors in the key elements of Bell’s framework for understanding AI, featuring big data, algorithms, machine learning, sensors and rationale/logic. We dispute notions of human autonomy and machine autonomy, seeking alternatives to both anthropocentric and technological determinist accounts of AI. While human actors and technological devices are co-producers of the assemblages around AI, we challenge the argument that their respective contributions are symmetrical. The theoretical problem is to establish quite how human actors are positioned asymmetrically within AI processes. This challenge has strong resonances for issues of inequality, democracy, governance and public policy. The theoretical questions raised do not support the argument that sociology should respond to the rise of big data by becoming a primarily empirical discipline.

Innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), advanced robotics and automatization, have already profoundly impacted the movement of people, information, ideas, communications and objects. How these technologies impact on future mobilities will depend on decisions made now, meaning that a sustained and creative engagement with AI and its applications by mobilities researchers is imperative. This chapter outlines an analytic approach to the emergent contours of complex automated mobilities systems, what we refer to as mobilities 3.0, and applies this to the case of AI military technology and weapons systems. Our conclusion identifies further challenges for the development and application of mobilities 3.0.

How far do recent innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence herald an unprecedented economic and social transformation? This article provides a critical evaluation of this question, challenging the relentless technological determinism of much debate, and reframing the issues involved within a political-economic and sociological approach. This focuses on the economic, political and historical dynamics of technological innovation, and its consequences for employment and economic re-structuring, mediated through sovereign and discursive power. A range of epistemological and empirical problems with the transformationist position are identified, and an alternative perspective proposed emphasizing complexity and uncertainty around contemporary and future trends.

Water is a principal medium of exchange within communities facing changing climate patterns and the ‘new dry’. For some parts of the globe water has been taken-for-granted, uncontested, yet for others highly variable, scarce and a measure of global and national inequalities. Australia as a large and diverse landmass is emblematic of those varied water contexts, yet as a whole, and after the recent ‘100-year drought’, water has become heavily regulated and marketised, and its material and symbolic meanings transformed. This has led us to ask: “What happens when water becomes marked or recognised as a scarce resource for all, indeed a site of contest and potential human conflict? How do the attempts to control water, through its market currency and environmental value, change the character of communities, the identities and interpersonal relationships that constitute the regional context?” After all, water is about far more than a material resource, it is also a cultural medium that is implicated the most fundamental aspects of life. In this study we explore the ways in which South Australian's living in the arid north of the state, above the Goyder Line, live and identify through the changing relations of water. Those changing relations are the changing availability and governance of water, nested within an ever-present public concern about climate change. We draw upon interviews with settler community members from a 200 square kilometre region across 7 towns or stations. Alongside the growing dry has been the developing commodification of water, having the effect of reducing local autonomy in the management and decision making about water conservation, supply and use. This paper considers the ways that these changes have transformative effects upon the differences and solidarities within local community relations.

This article reports on a study into the ideological beliefs of first year prospective teachers. Here ideologies are understood as expressions of specific 'world views' and certain collective interests. Data were drawn from tasks that attempted to get students to position themselves relative to and reflect upon questions and propositions related to social justice as it applied to education. It was found that most students work with a variant of liberal ideology, emphasising individual autonomy, a capacity for self-assertion and the fulfilment of native potentials. While expressing a concern about inequality and misrecognition, student responses also provided insights into the limits of liberal approaches to social justice, these arising from an underdeveloped sense of the dynamic tension between society and individual.

In their introduction to this collection, the editors announce that inaction on ecological problems is no longer optional as ‘the environment is already exercising its own imperative’ (p. 22). That ecological exigencies provide occasions to visit questions on governance with a global prospect is not in itself a particularly novel insight, though on one level the collection does serve as a solid overview of debates in this field. It is in its insistence that the institutional and the ethical are a job-lot, as it were, that the volume really comes into its own. One of its strengths is the way it attempts to initiate discussion where this is too often absent. One such conversation centres on the types of governing institutions that could execute a move away from a paradigm of economic development that prioritizes market-based allocative efficiencies, towards one predicated upon just intraand inter-generational resource distributions. Edmondson suggests the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a model in this regard. After considering and dismissing a range of existing codes of practice for transnationals, Humphreys argues that the nation-state, if it can be purged of its fixation with economic liberalism and take on the TNCs, must form the central plank to any new regulatory initiatives. Jokela stakes out a different position again, arguing that forests are readily understood in terms of private property rights, and that the European Union is developing the type of collective actor capabilities suited to a need for strong leadership against this. Postiglione likewise draws on the experience of the European Court of Justice in discussing ways shortcomings might be overcome in an International Court of the Environment. This collection works well as a collection. The play of contrasts between individual analyses, and the ways these can be credited to the accounts of, for instance, the diversity of environmental issues or aspects of the governance process addressed, along with the varied professional backgrounds of the authors, illustrate many of the thorny and persistent problems that are a feature of this field. This said, these conversations could easily be extended much further than they have been. While the authors here are drawn from a variety of countries (a good number, including the editors, are from Australia), notably absent are non-western voices speaking to their own accounts. And although a significant amount of sociology has insinuated