The Automation of General Intelligence

This excerpt from a book on labor, rules and automation argues that the division of labor and its measurement have long shaped machine intelligence, and that machine learning models encode social relations. It reformulates Babbage's "labor theory of automation" for the age of AI, drawing on Marx's critique that social relations of production drive the development of the means of production, not the reverse. The text traces a lineage from assembly-line management and operations research to connectionism, and it describes Google's 1998 PageRank algorithm as an early large-scale use of big data. It also notes that Facebook, the US military, and gig economy platforms such as Uber and Amazon use network mapping and geolocation to track people and labor.