At this session of our counter-narratives circle we will discuss "The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence." Everyone attending needs to do the reading beforehand, but it's OK if you don't manage to finish in time!

In the past decade machine learning and AI have helped establish a monopolistic regime of knowledge extractivism on a global scale, an unprecedented concentration of power as knowledge in the hands of a few mega-corporations.

In this book Matteo Pasquinelli argues that the most sophisticated 'intelligent' machines, and AI as a whole, have emerged by imitating the outline of the collective division of labour. The power of this new 'master' is thus not derived from the automation of labour itself, but from the automation of management: the management of the social division of labour.

Rather than addressing the social implications and impact of AI, as many have done, this book focuses on the role of collective knowledge and labour as the primary source of the intelligence that AI extracts, encodes and commodifies. It highlights the central role of such social intelligence in informing and empowering AI, going as far as to shape the very design of AI algorithms.

The new 'eye of the master,' incarnated by AI monopolies of data, enables mega-companies (Amazon, Walmart, Google etc.) unprecedented access to people's lives and needs. A growing movement is calling not just for making these infrastructures more transparent and accountable but actually collectivising them as public services, or replacing them by public alternatives that work in the interest of communities and the collective, never entirely relinquishing agency and intelligence to automation.

This calls for a new culture of invention, design and planning. In designing alternatives we need to bear in mind that any technology and institutional apparatus, including AI, is a crystallisation of a productive social process. This crystallisation ossifies and reiterates past structures, hierarchies and inequalities. We therefore need to first take apart the social and economic fabric that constitutes these complex AI monopolies: specifically their inbuilt wage system, property rights and identity politics.

Please contact me (Sona) at spxx@kpnmail.nl for further info or if you plan to attend. Looking forward to seeing you!

About the author: Matteo Pasquinelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. His research focuses on the intersection of philosophy of mind, political economy, and the automation of knowledge and cultural production. Prior to this he has taught at the Pratt Institute New York and at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, where he founded the research group on Artificial Intelligence and Media Philosophy.

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