Taking artificial intelligence from the ‘priesthood’ and providing it as a service: a media-genealogical perspective on big tech’s AI platformisation

At the same time, they promote their cloud platforms as a means of ‘democratizing’ AI as they distribute easy-to-use AI services at scale. In this article, I propose a media-genealogical approach to situate this claim of ‘democratization’ within a broader development in the infrastructuralisation and platformisation of computing.

I focus on three historic moments: (1) the invention of time-sharing and the idea of a ‘computer utility’ in the 1960s; (2) the introduction of abstraction to facilitate software development in the 1970s; and (3) the rise of digital platforms and the provision of user-friendly internet services in the 2000s. I demonstrate how each of these moments of ‘democratization’ is marked by a certain duality: on the one hand, they have expanded access to information technologies through the large-scale distribution of resources and the simplification of complex technologies into services.