Matteo Pasquinelli > Quotes

“Lovelace defined as an ‘operation’ the control of material and symbolic entities beyond the second-order language of mathematics (like the idea, discussed in chapter 1, of an algorithmic thinking beyond the boundary of computer science). In a visionary way, Lovelace seemed to suggest that mathematics is not the universal theory par excellence but a particular case of the science of operations. Following this insight, she envisioned the capacity of numerical computers qua universal machines to represent and manipulate numerical relations in the most diverse disciplines and generate, among other things, complex musical artefacts: [The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine … Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“proof of the social genealogy of AI: the first artificial neural network – the perceptron – was born not as the automation of logical reasoning but of a statistical method originally used to measure intelligence in cognitive tasks and to organise social hierarchies accordingly.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“There will be a day in the future when current AI will be considered an archaism, one technical fossil to study among others.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“The scale shift of labour composition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries affected also the logic of automation, that is, the scientific paradigms involved in this transformation. The relatively simple industrial division of labour and its seemingly rectilinear assembly lines could easily be compared to a simple algorithm, a rulebased procedure with an ‘if/then’ structure which has its equivalent in the logical form of deduction. Deduction, not by coincidence, is the logical form that via Leibniz, Babbage, Shannon, and Turing innervated into electromechanical computation and eventually symbolic AI. Deductive logic is useful for modelling simple processes, but not systems with a multitude of autonomous agents, such as society, the market, or the brain.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“As any word implies a grammar, any number hides an algorithm – that is, a procedure for representing quantities and for performing operations with quantities. In conclusion, all numbers are algorithmic numbers as they are manufactured by those algorithms that are the systems of numerations. Numerals count nothing (so to speak); they are simply position holders in a procedure – an algorithm – of quantification.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“one could say that computation emerged as both the automation of the division of mental labour and the calculus of the costs of such labour.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence