The ability to understand the world through AI, and to intervene in it, is increasingly the domain of those with the capacity to develop the biggest models, and even academics who are leading the research need access to the large-scale comp…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 …
Simon Schaffer
historian · 3 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Simon Schaffer is a historian of science whose work illuminates how computing technologies carry the social and economic logics of their origins, particularly through his examination of figures like Charles Babbage and the historical entanglement of mechanical computation with labor extraction. In these readings, Schaffer's scholarship enables a genealogical critique of contemporary AI—tracing how dependencies on industrial infrastructure, computational scale, and human labor are not incidental to AI systems but inherit deep historical patterns from early computing's origins in manufacturing and colonial resource extraction. His approach models how "Pandaemonium Architecture" participants can read present-day AI not as a break from the past but as a continuation of long-established relationships between knowledge production, power, and exploitation.
Mentioned in 2 readings
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