The New Coevolution of Information Science and Social Science : From Software Agents to Artificial Societies and Back or How More Computing Became Different Computing

The ways in which exponentially increasing IT capabilities are reshaping the social sciences are briefly reviewed. Many of these changes are primarily increases in scale and scope and do not represent new methodology. However, one specific IT-facilitated development—multi-agent systems—holds out the promise of fundamentally altering the ways in which social science models are conceived, built, explored and evaluated. Here the nascent field of multi-agent social science is described and some alternative futures for it are sketched. But it turns out that the road from IT to social science is not a one way street. Increasingly, results from the social sciences are making their way into computer and information science. Specifically, multi-agent systems researchers are progressively utilizing ideas from game theory (e.g., mechanism design), economics (e.g., auction theory), and even sociology (e.g., social networks). Today we are witnessing the beginnings of the coevolution of IT and social science, a process that offers to invigorate the social sciences, while simultaneously threatening their very existence as autonomous fields of inquiry.

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