Although Siri and Google Assistant have the ability to schedule meetings on request, they do not have the social awareness to independently prioritise the appointments. A team of researchers has argued that the future of AI calls for the implementation of social intelligence to ensure that the growth of the technology is not stunted by a lack of social skills. The work, 'Artificial Social Intelligence: A Comparative and Holistic View,' is published in CAAI Artificial Intelligence Research. "Artificial Intelligence has changed our society and our daily life," said first author Lifeng Fan, National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI). "What is the next important challenge for AI in the future? We argue that Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) is the future of AI." ASI includes multiple siloed subfields, including social perception, Theory of Mind, and social interaction.

Sociologists have begun to explore the gains for theory and research that might be achieved by artificial intelligence technology: symbolic processors, expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and classifier systems. The first major accomplishments of artificial social intelligence (ASI) have been in the realm of theory, where these techniques have inspired new theories as well as helping to render existing theories more rigorous. Two application areas for which ASI holds great promise are the sociological analysis of written texts and data retrieval from the forthcoming Global Information Infrastructure. ASI has already been applied to some kinds of statistical analysis, but how competitive it will be with more conventional techniques remains unclear. To take advantage of the opportunities offered by ASI, sociologists will have to become more computer literate and will have to reconsider the place of programming and computer science in the sociological curriculum.