Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future recounts findings from a six-year ‘mission’ to ‘identify the villains’ in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Uncovering the history and future of AI through a feminist lens, Tracey Spicer puts the conservatism at the heart of these oft-touted ‘revolutionary technologies’ on full display. Spicer contextualises AI’s current omnipresence in a world ruled by money, the military, and men. Interlacing an impressive range of vignettes, Man-Made introduces the reader to everything from AI’s origins in women’s weaving, to racist soap dispensers, to Sexbots, to gaming, to driverless cars, to childcare robots, to the end of humanity.

We begin the journey by unpicking the myth of the so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ of AI. The name given to the group of men who attended a conference at Dartmouth in 1956, where the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined. Spicer rebukes the conference’s lack of diversity – gendered, intersectional, interdisciplinary – and its overblown status as the beginning of AI as we know it. Although contributions were made, these ‘fathers’ were no more the first to discover AI than Captain Cook was the first to discover Australia. The privileged position occupied by this event and these men reflects a common theme in technology and science narratives where innovations are portrayed as the result of an individual man’s genius.