In her lecture on December 15, 2018, Dr. Phoebe V Moore presents */work design phases/*, focussing on scientific management and systems operations research, where within each period, forces, technics and relations of production reflect and demonstrate respective perceptions for what human as well as machine intelligence is i.e. how it was perceived during each period – and how these perceptions of intelligence can be linked to productivity and the machinic, to identify what is artificial in artificial intelligence.

Intelligence has been searched for in the human mind as well as in all kinds of technics and machines over time, even before the introduction of so-called Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s. This all-too-human search has introduced a correlation that, while machines have continuously been anthropomorphized, and as intelligence has been perceived to be present particularly in machines intended to replace or assist workers, humans ourselves become mechanized. However, thinking about human intelligence from the functioning of mechanical, physical, and calculation and now prediction machines in the labour process and work design configurations occurs within specific periods of the capitalist mode of production. This dialectic had to become a common development that can be shown in an outline of history: each stage of technical innovation and revolution have introduced ideas of human intelligence on the one hand, and machinic intelligence, on the other. 

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The audio file of the lecture can be downloaded here.