Skip to main content

AI Sciences

The broad, interdisciplinary family of fields that study artificial intelligence from multiple perspectives: computer science, mathematics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, ethics, and sociology. AI sciences include technical disciplines (machine learning, computer vision, NLP), human‑facing fields (human‑AI interaction, explainable AI), and critical studies (AI ethics, algorithmic fairness, AI law). Together, they investigate what AI is, how it works, how it affects society, and how it should be governed. The plural “sciences” acknowledges that no single discipline can fully grasp the AI phenomenon.
Example: “The conference brought together AI sciences: engineers presented new architectures, psychologists studied user trust, and philosophers debated whether an AI could have moral standing.”
AI Sciences by Dumu The Void April 11, 2026
AI Sciences mug front
Get the AI Sciences mug.
See more merch

Social Sciences Applied to AI

The practice of using insights from sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science to design, understand, and regulate artificial intelligence. It recognizes that AI systems are not neutral math problems but are embedded in human social contexts. This field asks: How will this algorithm affect community dynamics? What social biases is it learning? How does it change power structures? It's the antidote to the naive view that AI is just code, reminding us that every AI is also a social actor.
Example: "They built a great recommendation engine, but without social sciences applied to AI, they accidentally created filter bubbles that radicalized their users."

AI Applied to Human Sciences

The integration of artificial intelligence into the humanities disciplines like history, philosophy, literature, and art criticism. AI tools can now reconstruct damaged historical texts, analyze stylistic patterns across a corpus of literature to identify influences, or generate philosophical arguments for critique. It's both a blessing and a crisis for the humanities: a powerful new method of inquiry that also challenges the very definition of human creativity and interpretation.
Example: "The Shakespeare scholar used AI to prove the authorship question once and for all—a perfect example of AI applied to human sciences, and the English department hasn't forgiven him for it."

Human Sciences Applied to AI

A broader term encompassing all humanities and human-centered disciplines (philosophy, history, linguistics, arts) brought to bear on the development and deployment of artificial intelligence. It goes beyond fixing bias to ask fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human in an age of intelligent machines? How do we preserve dignity, creativity, and meaning? It's the practice of ensuring that as we build smarter machines, we don't build dumber or lesser humans in the process.
Example: "The ethics board was useless until they brought in a philosopher for human sciences applied to AI—he asked questions about personhood that the engineers had never even considered."

Cognitive Sciences Applied to AI

The practice of using our understanding of the human mind—perception, memory, reasoning, language, and learning—to inspire and improve artificial intelligence. It's the belief that the best way to build a smart machine is to reverse-engineer the only working example we have: the human brain. From neural networks (loosely inspired by neurons) to reinforcement learning (inspired by animal conditioning), this field has been central to AI's development, for better and for worse.
Cognitive Sciences Applied to AI Example: "The chatbot was terrible at conversation until they applied cognitive sciences to AI and taught it to manage turn-taking and context like a real human would."

AI Applied to Social Sciences

The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning as powerful new tools for social science research. This includes using large language models to analyze centuries of text, employing computer vision to study non-verbal behavior in archived footage, or building agent-based models to simulate the spread of ideas or diseases through populations. It's the computational revolution coming for sociology and anthropology, offering the ability to find patterns in data too vast for any human researcher to process.
Example: "He used to spend years interviewing people; now with AI applied to social sciences, he just feeds millions of Reddit comments into an algorithm and calls it a day."

AI Applied to Cognitive Sciences

The use of artificial intelligence as a tool to model, test, and understand the human mind. By building computational models that perform cognitive tasks—recognizing faces, making decisions, learning languages—researchers can create and test theories about how our own cognition might work. If an AI model behaves like a human under certain conditions, it might suggest that the human brain is using a similar computational strategy. It's cognitive science's most powerful laboratory.
Example: "They weren't sure how children learn grammar until they used AI applied to cognitive sciences to build a model that learned the same way, confirming their hypothesis."