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Interpretation Machines
Contradictions of "Artificial Intelligence" in 21st-Century Capitalism
Larry Lohmann

13 July 2020

What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into? In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines." To do so, argues this version of an essay published in Socialist Register 2021, is to point to ecological and political continuities between 19th-century and 21st-century automation -- continuities that may help clarify strategies for popular struggle.

file iconInterpretation Machines

Penelope Fitzgerald and the Field of Consciousness
Larry Lohmann

29 June 2025

Confronting the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s subtleties of style and construction, critics and other readers often resort to phrases like “distillation,” “economy,” “tamped-down force,” “muted power,” “the unsaid speaks,” “magical” and “how is it done?” But the brimming sense of life that Fitzgerald shares in her brief pages reflects not so much magic as a lifetime of hard thought about power, voice, representation, gender, and recognition.

file iconPenelope Fitzgerald and the Field of Consciousness.pdf

Labour, Energy and the Colonial Geography of Artificial Intelligence
Larry Lohmann

24 August 2022

This exploratory working paper attempts to place the energy-intensive project of mechanizing interpretive labor known as artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the longer trajectory of post-18th century industrialization and the capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work.

file iconLabour, Energy and the Colonial Geography of Artificial Intelligence.pdf

Cadenas de bloques, automatización y trabajo: Mecanizando la confianza

Blockchain Machines, Earth Beings and the Labour of Trust
Larry Lohmann

15 August 2020

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself.