What people call “AI” is actually a long historical process of crystallizing collective behavior, personal data, and individual labor into privatized algorithms that are used for the automation of complex tasks: from driving to translation, from object recognition to music composition. Just as much as the machines of the industrial age grew out of experimentation, know-how, and the labor of skilled workers, engineers, and craftsmen, the statistical models of AI grow out of the data produced by collective intelligence. Which is to say that AI emerges as an enormous imitation engine of collective intelligence. What is the relation between artificial intelligence and human intelligence? It is the social division of labor.

To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labor force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible. —Simon Schaffer If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. —Alan Turing Metacognition in the Twenty-First Century California Adult The idea that “machines think” displays an unintended solidarity with the animism of less industrialized cultures, which have long recognized autonomous...

The atoms encode. Material elements, they perform as well as signs; they inform each other mutually, elect each other, choose each other, reflect each other, repel each other, like the diamonds in that cave of wonders, like all molecules do, like the codes of the living combine … They encode, we encode; they count, we count; we speak, they speak. Knowledge is thus the ability to listen and to translate the scattered languages of things. They usually speak mathematics. —Michael...