Matteo Pasquinelli. The eye of the master: a social history of artificial intelligence

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/0103-2070.ts.2025.237138

Keywords:

Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Division of labor, Epistemology, Connectionism

Abstract

The review presents and discusses the central points of Matteo Pasquinelli’s book, The eye of the master: A social history of artificial  intelligence. Londres/Nova York, Verso, 2023. The interpretation of automation as a result of the development of the division of labor and its metrics, along with the primacy of the mental components of all labor, leads the author to reinterpret the history of theoretical efforts that anticipated the advent of Artificial Intelligence. His political epistemology seeks to do justice to the contribution of social forms and forces to the key stages in the development of artificial neural networks and machine learning, as well as to strengthen the ties between labor supervision and automation.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

  • Diego dos Santos Moura Gonçalves, Universidade de São Paulo

    Master’s student in Sociology at PPGS-USP. Holds a Bachelor's degree in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo (2022). He is an affiliated researcher at the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI/USP/IBM), where he is part of the Digital Labor Markets group. He is also a member of the CNPq research group Digital Sociology and Artificial Intelligence and of the research group Mobilities: Theories, Themes and Methods (MTTM).

  • Antônio Olegário Ferreira Neto, Universidade de São Paulo

    Graduado em Ciências Sociais pela Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais e mestre em Sociologia pelo PPGS/UFMG. Doutorando pelo PPGS/USP e pesquisador do CCI/CEBRAP. Pesquisa principalmente o trabalho por plataformas no Brasil, com especial interesse nos temas relativos à formação de condutas e ao comportamento político dos trabalhadores. Tem experiência nas áreas de sociologia do trabalho, sociologia política e metodologias qualitativas.

References

Acemoglu, Daron & Jonhson, Simon. (2023), Power and progress: our thousand-year struggle over technology & prosperity. Nova York, PublicAffairs.

Dieter, Michael et al. (2019), “Multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions”. Social Media + Society, 5 (2). doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486.

Grossmann, Henryk. (2009), “Descartes and the social origins of the mechanistic concept of the world”. In: Freudenthal, Gideon & Mclaughlin (eds.). The social and economic roots of the scientific revolution. Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. Berlim, Springer.

Kohlbry, Marc. (2024), “Marc Kohlbry reviews The eye of the master”. Critical Inquiry. Disponível em https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/marc_kohlbry_reviews_the_eye_of_the_master/.

Kukkala, V. et al. (set. 2018), “Advanced driver-assistence systems: A path toward autonomous vehicles”. IEEE Consum. Electron. Mag., 7 (5): 18-25. doi: 10.1109/mce.2018.2828440.

Levy, Karen. (2023), Data driven: Truckers, technology, and the new workplace surveillance. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Marx, Karl. (1993), Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. Tradução de Martin Nicolaus. Londres, Penguin, pp. 690-71.

McCulloch, Warren & Pitts, Walter. (1943), “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity”. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5.

Oliveira Neto, Geraldo et al. (2019), “Adoption of a telemetry system by a logistics service provider for road transport of express cargo: A case study in Brazil”. International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications, 22 (6).

Pasquinelli, Matteo. (2024a). “Beyond the schism of value-form and labor-form in AI studies and the humanities: a response to critical inquiry”. e-flux Notes.

Pasquinelli, Matteo: https://www.matteopasquinelli.com/

Pasquinelli, Matteo. (2024b), “Theories of automation from the industrial factory to AI platforms: an overview of political economy and history of science and technology”. Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, Bologna, 15 (1).

Pfister, Rolf & Jud, Hansueli. (2025), “Understanding and benchmarking artificial intelligence: OpenAI’s o3 is not AGI”. Davos, Lab42 AI Research Institute; Munique, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

Poell, Thomas et al. (2020), “Plataformização”. Tradução de Rafael Grohmann. Revista Fronteiras, 22.

Thompson, William. (1824), An inquiry into the principles of the distribution of wealth most conducive to human happiness applied to the newly proposed system of voluntary equality of wealth. Londres, Longman.

Zuboff, Shoshana. (2018), The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Nova York, PublicAffairs.

Published

2025-08-30

Issue

Section

Reviews

How to Cite

Gonçalves, D. dos S. M., & Ferreira Neto, A. O. (2025). Matteo Pasquinelli. The eye of the master: a social history of artificial intelligence. Tempo Social, 37(2), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.11606/0103-2070.ts.2025.237138