David Noble

When David Noble opened the archives of the U.S. Air Force and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1970s, he did not find a story of progress. He found a story of power. His 1984 book Forces of Production demonstrated, with the granularity of a prosecutor, that numerical control was chosen over its superior rival record playback not because it worked better but because it served management’s interest in removing productive knowledge from workers’ hands. Noble’s method was to take the mythology of inevitable technological progress and demand it justify itself against the record—and the record almost never could. He argued that the same structural logic that transferred the machinist’s tacit expertise into a programming department now transfers the software developer’s knowledge into a large language model owned by a handful of corporations, making his work the most rigorous analytical lens available for the age of AI. Noble died in 2010, but his framework—who controls the tool, from what material was it built, in whose