Abstract

When artificial intelligence algorithms produce significant social effects, orienting collective behaviors, transforming urban spaces, perpetuating inequalities, generating new forms of stratification, how should we understand the nature of this causality? This article proposes the concept of participated agency to overcome the inadequacy of existing categories. Anthropomorphism attributes intentionality and subjectivity to AI, treating algorithms as conscious agents. Instrumental reductionism denies any causal efficacy to algorithmic mediations, reducing AI to neutral tools. Both positions share a common assumption: agency must be either fully subjective or completely absent. Participated agency designates a form of causal efficacy that genuinely participates in human action while remaining ontologically subordinate to properly human intelligence—that endowed with intentionality, self-consciousness, and meaning-making capacity. Drawing on Bourdieu's habitus and Latour's Actor-Network Theory, the article articulates this concept through two mechanisms: machine habitus (algorithmic sedimentation of cultural dispositions) and asymmetric co-constitution (mutual definition of human practices and algorithmic systems while maintaining human ontological priority). The empirical case of Waze demonstrates how algorithms coordinate individual behaviors generating unintended collective consequences. The analysis explores sociological implications: crystallization of dispositions, self-fulfilling prophecies, distributed responsibility, requiring governance operating on mediation itself rather than merely regulating use.