Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Babbage appears in the readings as the foundational figure whose mechanical engines established computing's conceptual architecture, but more critically, he represents the historical origin point of an exploitative labor logic that persists into contemporary AI systems. The course uses him to trace a genealogy of anti-worker sentiment and extractive practices from his dismissal of skilled craftspeople to modern platform labor, suggesting that AI's reliance on crowdsourced annotation inherits rather than transcends the devaluation of human labor embedded in computing's prehistory. This genealogical move stakes a claim that the political economy of AI is not accidental but structural to how the field has understood automation and efficiency from its inception.

Mentioned in 3 readings

Scott Benzel

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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