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
Schaffer appears here primarily as a citation regarding the ideological framing of scientific progress in Victorian Britain, specifically how the nebular hypothesis functioned within broader narratives of advancement. The course reading invokes his work to historicize how computational and technological development have always been entangled with social progress narratives, suggesting that contemporary AI's dependency on extractive labor practices and corporate infrastructure isn't exceptional but continuous with the ideological commitments embedded in computing's origins with figures like Babbage. His intervention helps the seminar argue that understanding AI requires attending to the historical genealogies and power structures that shaped how we came to believe in technology as progress.
Mentioned in 2 readings
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.