The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

A history of artificial intelligence that locates its origin in the organisation of labour rather than in the imitation of the human brain.

Pasquinelli argues that the logic of AI comes from the automation of work and from the social relations of the factory, including the surveillance of collective behaviour. The 272-page book follows that line from Babbage's calculating engines and the mechanisation of mental labour through Marx's general intellect, Hayek's epistemology of connectionism and the invention of the perceptron, to current image-recognition systems. It rejects the idea that algorithms could become autonomous.

Matteo Pasquinelli is an associate professor of philosophy of science at Ca' Foscari University in Venice. The Eye of the Master was published by Verso in October 2023 and won the 2024 Deutscher Memorial Prize. His essay on the history of the algorithm also appears in the HeK Basel catalogue Entangled Realities.