What is AI? Matteo Pasquinelli
Gustave Doré, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 28: The Severed Head of Bertrand de Born Speaks to Dante, 1885
Gustave Doré, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 28: The Severed Head of Bertrand de Born Speaks to Dante, 1885
Philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli’s new book, The Eye of the Master (2023), traces (per its subtitle) the “social history of artificial intelligence.” He begins with an ancient Hindu ritual dedicated to the god Prajapati, who becomes dismembered after he creates the world. Still practiced to this day, the ritual is intended to reconstruct the body of God by using one thousand bricks in a sophisticated geometrical shape while following a mantra, which Pasquinelli calls an algorithm – or rather, a social algorithm, one of the first of its kind in human history. His point is that such mathematical abstractions emerge through labor and practice, rituals and craft, and they do not belong solely to the advanced societies of the Global North, such as Silicon Valley. Technology, he claims, was not “invented by genius engineers and scientists” but rather emerged from the lower classes – the terms computer and typewriter were job titles for humans before becoming names referring only to machines. As such, he develops a theory of technology that had roots in social relations and material design before showing how artificial intelligence is constructed through an incredible collectivity that remains invisible.
For him, artificial intelligence is not about imitating biological intelligence; it’s about the statistical mapping of social relations—and he notes that statistics first emerged from techniques to control and measure society. In the end, Pasquinelli calls for a new culture of AI, so that the social relations become apparent in the design of artifacts. Only then will they be able to change AI.
