From the Physics of Society to a Sociology of Artificial Agents

RESUMO

Sociology emerged from Comte's ambition to study society as a form of "social physics" and was later refined by Durkheim's concept of the social fact a collective regularity that cannot be reduced to any single individual's behavior. This essay argues that a structurally similar problem is now emerging in a new domain: interactions among artificial intelligence agents. Drawing on recent empirical work showing that populations of large language model agents can spontaneously develop shared conventions and collective biases through repeated interaction, the essay proposes a new field of inquiry the Sociology of Artificial Agents dedicated to studying the relational, normative, cultural, and organizational patterns that emerge among AI agents themselves, independent of direct human involvement. It introduces the concept of the "artificial social fact" as an analytical bridge between classical sociology and this new research terrain, while cautioning against anthropomorphizing AI systems. The claim is not that artificial agents form societies in the human sense, but that their interactions already produce measurable collective patterns worthy of systematic sociological study.