connectionist-theory

Hayek's 1952 theory of the mind as a self-organizing connectionist system that anticipates later AI models but serves market autonomy rather than automation.

1 chapter across 1 book

The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (2023)Matteo Pasquinelli

Chapter 8 clarifies the ambivalent role that the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek had in consolidating connectionism. In his 1952 book The Sensory Order, Hayek proposed a connectionist theory of the mind which was already far more advanced than the definitions of AI that emerged from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. In this text, as McCulloch and Pitts had also proposed, Hayek speculated about the possibility of a machine fulfilling a similar function to ‘the nervous system as an instrument of classification’.45 Hayek studied the self-organisation of the mind in a similar fashion to the cyberneticians but in order to serve a different agenda: not industrial automation but the autonomy of the market.

Chapter 8 explores Friedrich Hayek's ambivalent contribution to connectionism and AI, highlighting his 1952 work The Sensory Order which proposed a connectionist theory of mind predating the 1956 Dartmouth AI definitions. Hayek's focus on self-organization of the mind served the neoliberal agenda of market autonomy rather than industrial automation. The chapter situates AI's operative principle not only as labor automation but as a mechanism for enforcing social hierarchies through intelligence metrics, revealing AI's intrinsic role in perpetuating class, gender, and racial biases within capitalist labor structures.