Surveillance Studies and the History of Artificial Intelligence: A Missed Opportunity?

This research note considers how scholars of surveillance might approach the historical legacies that surveillance through artificial intelligence (AI) is implicated in. Engaging with the relative lack of historical studies within the pages of Surveillance & Society, the note argues that in the context of surveillant AI the stakes of an ahistorical analysis are especially high. Bridging scholarship within the history of science with surveillance studies, the note explores how AI techniques today reanimate a longer history of how scientific knowledge production on classification has been coextensive with the maintenance and production of racial, gender, and social hierarchies. The note briefly examines one genealogy––the history of the field of pattern recognition, its relationship to state surveillance, and its understanding of identification as a problem of classification––to consider how surveillance and AI contingently converged. The note concludes by showing how such histories can help scholars of surveillance critically reassess common understandings of the consequences of AI and AI-adjacent surveillance practices used today.