Timeline

• May 07, 2025: started reading.
• Jul 14, 2025: finished reading.

Review

Enjoyed this, though it took me a bit longer to circle back to than I expected.

Pasquinelli does an excellent job of charting the deep history and development of AI as a concept, technology, and social process.

Most crucially, for my money, he makes a detailed and convincing argument that AI is not some miraculous innovation in technology but rather the logical next step in a long process of the mechanization and automation of labor tasks. It’s also refreshing to have a social scholar acknowledge the flawed premise these models are based on and reference recent research into their diminishing returns.