CONCEPT
The Politics of Intelligence (Schaffer)
Schaffer’s analysis revealing that the attribution of “intelligence” to machines has always been entangled with the prior social devaluation of the human labor those machines replace—a task performed by low-status workers is reclassified as mechanical, and when a machine performs it, the machine is celebrated as intelligent.
In his 1994 essay “Babbage’s Intelligence,”
Simon Schaffer traced the genealogy of the concept of machine intelligence to the factory system and the politics of labor.
Charles Babbage’s calculating engines were not conceived in a vacuum of pure mathematical imagination; they emerged from, and were justified by, the industrial system of divided labor that Babbage had celebrated in his 1832
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. Babbage understood that the power of the factory system lay in the decomposition of complex tasks into simple, repetitive operations that could be performed by unskilled workers—and, ultimately, by machines. His engines applied this same logic to mental labor: complex computation was decomposed into simple operations that could be mechanized. The engine was not a brain; it was a factory for calculation. And its intelligibility as an “intelligent” machine depended on the prior
social devaluation of the