This review, written by Ahwar Sultan, has now been published in Critical AI at this link https://doi.org/10.1215/2834703X-11700300; an extract is pasted in below. If your institution lacks access to Critical AI please encourage them to subscribe. If you are an independent scholar please write to criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
EXTRACT:
From screenwriters in Hollywood to social media content moderators in Nairobi, workers are addressing AI with increasing directness as they confront capital. Timely, then, are Marxist approaches to AI, which foreground class conflict. An enduring challenge for such approaches, however, is the quixotic search for a revolutionary subject—that is, the working class as a self-conscious protagonist of history—along with a universalistic abstraction of labor that often excludes or misunderstands the work of women, colonized people, and nature itself. Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master and Justin Joque’s Revolutionary Mathematics are two new attempts to update the Marxist concept-repertoire for the age of AI even while acknowledging the specter of the revolutionary subject as a perennial problem of Marxist social theory.
Pasquinelli, a philosopher of science and society, traces the historical development of AI to the relationship between labor and automation. The Eye of the Master stands apart from what…