SocioLens — Field Map v0.2

The Field Map is the plan of the field drawn up before the debates were written, kept unchanged. It names 17 debates; the 12 that are published link to their pages, and the others are planned, not published.

• * T1 Object–instrument–measurement recursion. The same systems, from the same firms, are object, force, instrument, data generator and measuring device.
• * T2 Externalist vs internalist. Must sociology open the box (training data, post-training, evals, internals), or study consequences? Anchored in Liu (2026), labelled as that author's judgment. It is a tension, not the master frame.
• * T3 Continuity vs rupture. Intensification of datafication, platform power and algorithmic governance, or a new formation? A continuity test is required on every debate page.
• * T4 What kind of thing? Tool or normal technology, social/cultural technology, agent, communicative infrastructure, or capital formation; infrastructure or product. Hosted as LD-01.
• * T5 Present institutional harm vs frontier/catastrophic risk. Commensurable scales, or rival causal theories? Hosted as LD-13.
• * T6 Measurement, critique and intervention. Which epistemic community governs, and what the field is for.
• * T7 Access vs independence. Studying firms whose data, tools, evaluations and funding the researcher needs.

• D1 Political economy, infrastructure and the stack
• D2 Organizations, work and the labour process
• D3 Knowledge, expertise and epistemic authority
• D4 Classification, quantification and evaluation (one domain, mandatory internal split)
  • * D4a Classification and quantification of persons, populations and institutions: scoring and sorting people (allocative and representational harms as classification situations), risk and fraud scoring, datafication and provenance of population data.
  • * D4b Evaluation and measurement of AI systems: definitions of "AI" as governance, benchmarks and leaderboards, LLM-as-judge, audits as measurement, incident taxonomies, documentation regimes, risk tiers and standards as measurement instruments.
• D5 Public authority, administration and discretion
• D6 Normative orders, regulation-in-practice and contestation (one domain, four sub-areas)
  • * D6.1 Rule-making and institutionalization: legislation, standards-setting, international regimes, company safety frameworks and model constitutions as private ordering.
  • * D6.2 Implementation, compliance and assurance: conformity assessment, notified bodies, audit and assurance markets, ethics-work inside compliance, liability and insurance.
  • * D6.3 Enforcement and oversight capacity: regulators, the AI Office and national authorities, fundamental-rights bodies, research-access regimes.
  • * D6.4 Contestation and legitimacy: litigation, civil society, advocacy investigations and agency rebuttals, social movements, worker and community contestation.
• D7 Public life and the information order
• D8 Everyday life, interaction and the self
• D9 AI in the research apparatus

• L-A Distribution and stratification (mandatory; canonical schema)
• L-B Geography, positionality and external validity (mandatory scope field)
• L-C AI-in-use and infrastructural inversion
• R-1 Evidence architecture
• R-2 Conceptual translation and continuity test

• LD-02 Aggregate null or distributional shift? Generative AI and employment
• LD-05 Discretion curtailed, relocated, or encoded?
• LD-07 AI in the research apparatus (cluster)
• LD-06 Is the evaluation apparatus fit to carry its weight?
• LD-03 Organizational absorption: why micro gains do not become macro outcomes
• LD-08 Who can know about AI? Epistemic dependence and jurisdiction
• LD-01 What kind of thing is generative AI, and does the answer predict anything?
• LD-10 Persuasion, intermediation and the information order
• LD-11 Concentration, the stack and sovereignty
• LD-12 Regulation-in-practice: rights regime, compliance industry, or industrial policy and developmental steering?
• LD-04 Levelling or hollowing? Skill compression and the reproduction of expertise
• LD-09 Individual gain, collective narrowing?
• LD-13 Safety and justice: compatible scales or rival causal theories?
• LD-14 Whose ground, whose water? Territorial politics of AI infrastructure
• LD-15 Data colonialism, capitalist enclosure, state sovereignty, or collective/Indigenous sovereignty?
• LD-16 From bias to power: what remedy when the task itself is punitive?
• LD-17 Companionship and the relational turn