Matteo Pasquinelli distinguishes The Eye of the Master from other recent monographs on automation and labor by offering a “social history of artificial intelligence.”1 By rooting the history of AI, or artificial intelligence, in the automation practices of the nineteenth-century British political economy, Pasquinelli highlights collective cultural heritage as the progenitor of machine intelligence. He contends that transformations taking place within global capitalism through AI were always already designed as crystallizations of the “human praxis and collective behaviors” undergirding capitalist modernity (TEM, 6). Advocating for a politics of invention and transformation that reclaims the embedded social knowledge and agency extracted by AI, Pasquinelli rightly emphasizes the role of political decision-making and economic inequality in the history of science and technology.
The Eye of the Master fails, however, to adequately account for the dynamics of exploitation transformed by computing technologies or the profound challenges to social practices...
