Intelligent Technologies and Methodological Transformations in the Social Sciences

Through a systematic review of the paradigm of contemporary social science research, this paper explores the changes that technologies and algorithms bring to traditional social science methodology. There is a large amount of literature discussing how the application of newly developed technologies provides new solutions to old problems, but little research has been done on how they reshape old problems into new ones. Specifically, how does the development of research tools restructure the criteria for a good study and determine the right questions to ask, and how do computer simulations and artificial intelligence reform social science methodology by changing our presuppositions about humans and society? This article intends to fill the gap by analyzing the evolution of social science methodology and its epistemological impacts.