GRAND COMPUTING CHALLENGES FOR SOCIOLOGY

Consideration of four possible grand computing challenges in sociology suggests that progress will come from wholly fresh approaches, rather than from mere improvements in current kinds of social science computing. Although it will be useful to access ordinary libraries over the future universal communications net, placing conventional sociological data sets on it will accomplish little. More valuable would be development of technologies that would allow social scientists far greater access to data already collected by government and industry while protecting the confidentiality of information about individuals. Especially exciting would be automatic systems to read data from hand-written records like the massive historical censuses of the 19th century. In nearly every area of social science, artificial social intelligence has the potential to revolutionize research and theory.