History as capture

Abstract

Myth, hype and industry-captured historiographies of AI, machine learning and computing depict the current moment as a unique and unprecedented confrontation with computational power, paying particular attention to the devastating effects this has on vulnerable communities (better: communities made vulnerable). But automated decision schemes are neither new nor newly urgent; they are the inheritance of almost seventy years of computing history, a history that has never not been entangled with state repression, genocidal and ecocidal violence and racialized expropriation. Carceralilty and artificial intelligence have a shared history, and the entanglements between them remain underappreciated by history writing on computing – despite the near-universal injunction to leverage history as a means to critique and counteract the cultural hegemony of computing. This paper examines some of the tensions underlying such calls for historical critique, calling into question the efficacy of such a project. I offer a study of the complex senses of history and development at work in the 2006 International Congress of Mathematics, discuss recent historiographies of computing (and science) from guild historians, and describe the ways academic history writing reproduces the same relations of dominance and campaigns of creation and conservation that scaffold mathematics and artificial intelligence.