PERSON
Shoshana Zuboff
American scholar (b. 1951) whose fieldwork in computerizing workplaces produced the automating versus informating distinction and whose surveillance capitalism framework diagnosed AI as extraction apparatus.
Shoshana Zuboff is one of the first tenured women at Harvard Business School, where her career-long investigation of technology's transformation of work established the foundational vocabulary for understanding AI's double movement. Her 1988 landmark In the Age of the Smart Machine introduced action-centered skill and intellective skill, documenting how computerization simultaneously destroyed embodied knowledge and created unrealized potential for deeper understanding. Her 2019 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism reframed the digital economy as a system extracting human experience as raw material, converting behavioral surplus into prediction products sold in behavioral futures markets. By 2025, her position hardened from regulation to abolition—calling for the dismantling of extraction mechanisms operating at civilizational scale.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Zuboff's methodology is ethnographic immersion. She spent years embedded in paper mills, telecommunications companies, and banks undergoing computerization in the 1980s—not consulting but observing, documenting how workers experienced the dissolution of knowledge forms they had spent decades building. The paper mill worker who felt pulp consistency between his fingers