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Artificial Experts (1990)
Collins's 1990 book whose title conceded nothing — the foundational text in which he first argued that AI's limitations are sociological rather than computational, developed through ethnographic study of expert systems and laser builders.
Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines (MIT Press, 1990) is Collins's first major book on artificial intelligence. The title's irony is central to its argument: machines could in some sense be 'expert' — they could reproduce expert outputs under constrained conditions — but the book's sustained argument is that the expertise so reproduced is not the expertise that human communities actually produce and maintain. The book established the sociological framework that Collins would refine across the subsequent three decades: expertise is a property of social groups maintaining practices, not of individuals processing information, and projects to build artificial experts by building artificial heads are therefore incomplete in principle, not merely technically limited.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was written in response to the expert systems era of 1980s AI, when rule-based systems promised to capture domain expertise in computational form. Collins's ethnographic observations of how expertise actually worked in scientific communities revealed