Eyeing up the master’s tools

For the past decade, high-profile breakthroughs in machine learning, and the resulting proliferation of technologies labelled as 'artificial intelligence' (AI), have fuelled widespread public and academic debates about 'AI ethics'-that is, about the impacts of these technologies and how they should be designed, used and governed.Pasquinelli situates The Eye of the Master as an intervention into these debates.His stated aim is to contribute to what he calls critical AI studies (10): a field of research that seeks to uncover and elucidate harms and injustices from AI technologies, such as algorithms that amplify racial and gender bias, enable the exploitation of vulnerable populations, or provide means of surveillance and social control (e.g., O'Neil 2016; Zuboff 2019).Far from a purely historical project, then, Pasquinelli seeks to provide theoretical tools for thinking critically about current and future AI technologies.The central contribution in this regard is what he calls the labour theory of automation (henceforth LTA).As the name signals, LTA is developed through a detailed analysis of debates about machinery in