WORK
The Eye of the Master
Pasquinelli's 2023 genealogy tracing AI as capital's centuries-long project to extract workers' collective knowledge and crystallize it in machines — from Babbage through neural networks.
Matteo Pasquinelli's
The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (2023) argues that artificial intelligence is not a recent innovation but the latest iteration of a project that capital has pursued for two centuries: the extraction of workers' collective knowledge and its crystallization in machines that then replace the workers whose knowledge they absorbed. From
Charles Babbage's explicit program of recording craft workers' techniques to replace them with automated machinery, through Frederick Taylor's time-and-motion studies that transferred workers' skill into management systems, to contemporary
neural networks trained on the collective output of knowledge workers,
the pattern is consistent. The machine learns by absorbing human intelligence. The humans whose intelligence was absorbed are then replaced by the machine. The workers are dispossessed of their own collective knowledge.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Pasquinelli credits Federici among the feminist scholars who 'have explained the rise of modern rationality and mechanical thinking (to which AI also belongs) in relation to the rule of women's bodies