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The Uncontroversial 'Thingness' of AI
Suchman's 2023 essay diagnosing how AI's reification as a coherent entity — a thing that acts, understands, threatens — obscures the sociomaterial assemblage through which actual computational systems operate.
'The Uncontroversial "Thingness" of AI' is Suchman's 2023 essay in Big Data & Society, a compressed diagnostic of how contemporary discourse — including critical discourse — reifies AI as a coherent, autonomous entity. 'How is it,' she asks, 'that AI has come to be figured uncontroversially as a thing, however many controversies "it" may engender?' The essay argues that this reification obscures what actual AI systems are: sociomaterial assemblages of hardware, software, training data, corporate decisions, user practices, and institutional contexts that cannot be meaningfully reduced to a single agent. The grammatical construction 'AI does X' smuggles in assumptions the analytical work of the essay painstakingly unpacks, and the consequences extend through every debate about AI safety, governance, and impact.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay's central observation is grammatical and therefore foundational. When commentators — enthusiasts, critics, regulators, journalists — write sentences of the form 'AI will do X' or 'AI threatens Y'