Shoshana Zuboff is an American social theorist and Harvard Business School professor emerita whose four-decade research career has fundamentally reshaped how scholars, policymakers, and the public understand the relationship between technology, labor, knowledge, and power. Her first landmark work,
In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988), emerged from years of ethnographic fieldwork in computerizing workplaces—paper mills, banks, telecommunications companies—and introduced the foundational distinction between automating (replacing human labor) and informating (creating new knowledge). Her concepts of action-centered skill and intellective skill provided the analytical vocabulary for understanding what workers lose and what they must develop when machines mediate their relationship to work. Her second landmark,
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), mapped how technology platforms convert human experience into 'behavioral surplus'—raw material processed into prediction products sold in behavioral futures markets—reframing the digital economy as a system of extraction rather than exchange. She coined surveillance capitalism, the Big Other, and instrumentarian power, concepts that have shaped regulatory discourse worldwide, influencing the EU AI Act and democratic