Marx and Babbage in Matteo Pasquinelli’s A social history of Artificial intelligence: Implications for demystifying AI and guiding the digital economy

This review article focuses on Matteo Pasquinelli’s recent work, The eye of the master: A social history of Artificial intelligence, which offers a politicized genealogy of AI and highlights the inseparability of AI’s ontology from the social and political conditions that produce its algorithms. Here, we use Hybrid Semantic Formalism, a hybrid language that utilizes generative AI strength of manipulating symbols and tokens, to create a logic map of Pasquinelli's categorization of social algorithm, formal algorithm, and automated algorithm. Crucially, Pasquinelli connects Babbage’s labor theory of automation and principle of labor calculation to Marx’s concept of the general intellect and reveals how various forms of machine intelligence mirrors, embodies, and amplifies the analytical intelligence of collective labour. Pasquinelli traces AI’s history alongside labour analysis, psychometrics, and the drive for a ‘control revolution,’ unpacking technical concepts such as self-organization and cybernetics to show that capitalist technologies are fundamentally sociomorphic and sociogenic: they formalize proven patterns of social cooperation rather than the biomorphic replication of how an individual’s mind performs a given task. This article argues that Pasquinelli’s analysis contributes vital insights into AI’s sociopolitical underpinnings and thus, advocating for democratic technopolitical practices to reshape algorithmic governance. This article concludes with four recommendations from Pasquinelli’s account for the development of Vietnam and the country’s searching for a vision of human-AI coexistence.