The Society of Agents: From the Sociological Imagination to Human-AI Coevolution
May 13, 2026
Riccardo Crosa · May 2026 · Hanse Media · Culture Series
What happens when the agents we design begin to form a society of their own? La società degli agenti traces the arc from C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination to a present in which autonomous AI entities learn, decide, and interact, redrawing the boundaries between human and artificial.
The book opens with a proposition: that coevolution, not replacement, is the more accurate frame for understanding the relationship between humans and AI agents. From there it moves through the structural shifts already underway: agents that negotiate on behalf of companies, agents that write and rewrite their own objectives, agents that collaborate with each other in ways their creators did not anticipate.
Crosa approaches the subject from a sociological rather than a technical perspective. The questions that drive the book are not about architecture or parameters, but about power, identity, and the social contracts we are forming, often without realizing it, with non-human actors. What does labour mean when your colleague is an agent? What does trust mean when the intermediary has no body? What does governance look like when the governed include entities that operate at a different speed?
The analysis extends to the economic models that currently shape AI development, the oligopolistic concentration of computational resources, and the bureaucratic inertia of governments attempting to regulate a technology that evolves faster than legislation. The tone is measured, the references are interdisciplinary, and the conclusions resist the binary of utopia and catastrophe in favour of something harder to sell but closer to reality: the discipline of learning to coexist.
An English edition, The Society of Agents: From the Sociological Imagination to Human-AI Coevolution, is forthcoming.
