The targets of this power (or ‘surveillance capitalism’ in Shoshana Zuboff’s definition) are usually described not as actors possessing autonomy and ‘intelligence’ on their own but as passive subjects of measurement and control. This is a problem of critical theory in general and critical AI studies in particular: although these studies are concerned about the impact of AI on society, they often overlook the role of collective knowledge and labour as the primary source of the very ‘intelligence’ that AI comes to extract, encode, and commodify. Moreover, these studies often fail to see the
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