Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Babbage is invoked here as the foundational figure whose vision of mechanical computation established computing's deep entanglement with labor exploitation and anti-worker ideology. The readings trace a genealogy from Babbage's Difference and Analytical Engines through contemporary AI platforms like Amazon's crowdsourced ImageNet labeling, arguing that extractive labor practices aren't incidental to computing but structural to it from its inception. By anchoring this critique in Babbage's own writings on the division of labor, the course frames current AI systems not as novel problems but as the fulfillment of computing's original design logic.

Background

Charles Babbage was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.

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Mentioned in 3 readings

Notes on Thinking Machine Imaginaries_ Llull

Leibniz, and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face'

6

Ada Augusta Byron, daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron and future countess Lovelace, was seventeen when she encountered Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine (below). A sophisticated mathematician versed in calculus and tutored by some o…sequence of instructions—that is, an algorithm” (Misa, below), the invention of the software loop and the nested loop (now called recursion, a process fundamental to contemporary artificial intelligence), while Note A suggested that machine…sequence of instructions—that is, an algorithm” (Misa, below), the invention of the software loop and the nested loop (now called recursion, a process fundamental to contemporary artificial intelligence), while Note A suggested that machine…

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Dan McQuillan

from Resisting AI, an Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence

3

This carelessness towards perspective and standpoint also applies to the labour of labelling these images. The only realistic way to create a database on this scale is to use crowdsourcing, and ImageNet images were labelled by the low paid,…Perhaps the dependency of AI on extractive labour practices should come as no surprise, given the much vaunted ancestry of computing in the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, those mechanical creations of Charles Babbage. Babbage …Another notable continuity between that time and the present day is the long arc of anti-worker sentiment that stretches from Charles Babbage to, for example, Jeff Bezos and today’s Amazon corporation. In the abovementioned volume, Babbage …

Benjamin H. Bratton

Platform and Stack, Model and Machine

1

platforms, from urban street grids to Google, and so to consider their common operations, some abstraction is necessary. Part of their alterity to normal public and private operations is the apparently paradoxical way that they standardize …

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