What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest “to solve intelligence” – a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. We are joined for a public talk and conversation with Matteo Pasquinelli, who instead suggests that the “mystery” of AI is just the automation of labour at the highest degree, not intelligence per se.

His new book The Eye of the Master (Verso Books, 2023) urges a new literacy on AI for scientists, journalists and new generations of activists, arguing that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage’s “calculating engines” of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surveillance.

In Conversation with Lars Pinkwart.

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Matteo Pasquinelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice where he is coordinating the 5-year ERC project AIMODELS. His research focuses the intersection of philosophy of mind, political economy, and the automation of knowledge and cultural production.

Previously he has been teaching at Pratt Institute New York and at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, where he founded the research group on Artificial Intelligence and Media Philosophy KIM (2018-2023).