PERSON
Matteo Pasquinelli
Italian philosopher of technology (b. 1972), professor at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, whose 2023 The Eye of the Master opens with a Gramsci epigraph and argues for reframing AI as the automation of labor rather than the emergence of intelligence.
Matteo Pasquinelli has spent two decades developing a political economy of AI that combines deep technical engagement with sustained structural analysis. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023) traces the intellectual genealogy of AI back through industrial management theory, cybernetics, and the measurement of labor — arguing that what appears as machine intelligence is the formalization and automation of human cognitive labor, historically developed to discipline and eventually replace workers. The book's opening Gramsci epigraph — "All human beings are intellectuals… although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of non-intellectuals, because non-intellectuals do not exist" — signals the Gramscian framework that shapes the analysis.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Pasquinelli's distinctive contribution is the reframing he proposes. Where dominant discourse asks "how intelligent is the machine?" — treating intelligence as an emergent property of increasing computational scale — Pasquinelli asks "whose labor