Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master overturns the mythology of artificial intelligence as either cerebral mimicry or autonomous technical destiny, arguing instead that AI is best understood as the automation of labour’s intelligence. Its decisive proposition is that machines become “intelligent” by extracting, formalising and recomposing the cognitive, perceptual and cooperative capacities already embedded in human work. The exemplary case is the self-driving car: far from proving that driving is merely mechanical, it reveals driving as a dense social practice of perception, judgement, habit, rule-following and tacit coordination. Pasquinelli extends this insight historically through de Prony’s organised calculation, Babbage’s engines, Marx’s general intellect, cybernetics, the perceptron and contemporary deep learning, showing that algorithmic systems inherit the managerial gaze of the “master” who divides, measures and recombines labour. His synthesis is therefore both technical and political: AI’s biases are not accidental glitches but expressions of automation’s long entanglement with class hierarchy, colonial ordering, gendered invisibility and psychometric classification. The book’s conclusion reframes machine intelligence as a social artefact: not a mind emerging from silicon, but a crystallisation of collective praxis under capitalist command. To critique AI, then, is not merely to audit algorithms, but to reclaim the social intelligence they appropriate.
