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A “social” history of AI that finally reveals its roots in the spatial computation of industrial factories and the surveillance of collective behaviour.

Table of Contents

Introduction: AI as Division of Labour
1 The Material Tools of Algorithmic Thinking

Part I
THE INDUSTRIAL AGE
2 Babbage and the Mechanisation of Mental Labour
3 The Machinery Question
4 The Origins of Marx's General Intellect
5 The Abstraction of Labour

Part II
THE INFORMATION AGE
6 The Self-Organisation of the Cybernetic Mind
7 The Automation of Pattern Recognition
8 Hayek and the Epistemology of Connectionism
9 Th e Invention of the Perceptron

Conclusion: The Automation of General Intelligence

About the Author

Matteo Pasquinelli is professor of media philosophy at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HFG), where he founded the research group on critical AI studies KIM. His writing has appeared in AI and Society, e-flux, Multitudes, Radical Philosophy, and the South Atlantic Quarterly, amongst other journals.

Reviews

We are surrounded by stories about AI threatening jobs, as if it were a power haunting labor from outside and above. The Eye of the Master radically challenges such a view. What Matteo Pasquinelli demonstrates is that labor is at root of the historical development of AI. Tales of expropriation and resistance, automation and struggle crisscross the pages of this passionate book, which is at same time an amazing academic achievement and a political weapon to rethink the politics of AI.
*Sandro Mezzadra, co-author of The Politics of Operations*

In this original and extremely timely book, Matteo Pasquinelli offers nothing less than a long-range history and critical analysis of a labour theory of automation and knowledge. He uses detailed studies both of the remarkable accounts of general intellect and the extractive and exploitative organisation of the industrial workplace produced in nineteenth-century British political economy and of the challenging developments of models of machine intelligence and computational systems developed in the mid-twentieth century United States to unlock the sources and meanings of the politics of artificial intelligence. The work shows how Marx's depiction of the development of the social individual under industrial capitalism provides indispensable resources for making sense now of what artificial intelligence means, and the forms of economic and political order that its embodiment of knowledge and control express. At a moment when apostles and prophets of machine intelligence proclaim both a utopian world of effortless control and a catastrophe of extinction, Pasquinelli's patient and clever work provides a crucial insight into the past and future of AI monopolies and their consequences.
*Simon Schaffer, author of Babbage’s Intelligence (1994) and OK computer (2001)*

Artificial Intelligence and its impact on society is on everyone's lips, but how was AI shaped by society in the first place? This amazing account of its emergence, starting with the evolution of labor division and automatization, is a must-read. Pasquinelli's book not only shows us where we came from but also how we might escape the problematic consequences of this evolution.
*Jürgen Renn, Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology.*

Drafting a new theory of automation is an ambitious project, and the book successfully lays a stable conceptual foundation..a highly stimulating read.
*Technology and Culture*

The breadth and depth of topics will engage readers who appreciate technical subject matters, their theories, and their complications.
*Technical Communication*

Pasquinelli's omnivorous intellect often mesmerizes.
*New York Review of Books*

Pasquinelli charts the development of modern artificial neural networks as the most recent iteration of capital's multigenerational effort to steal workers' knowledge and crystallize that knowledge into machines; machines owned by, and thus providing all their productive benefits to, the capitalist class.
*Spring*