Knowledge Capital

“Artificial Intelligence” as it exists today is a cultural text, as well as a set of technologies. As a text, it is not only available for accepting or resisting, but for interpreting; as a cultural text it holds enormous significance for cultural institutions like libraries. In this book, Sam Popowich focuses on AI as cultural text in order to investigate it from the perspectives of class, culture, and artificial reason itself. More specifically, this book explores contemporary AI in libraries in terms of capitalism and the automation of library labour; class struggle, deprofessionalization, and proletarianization; and knowledge, reason, and cultural hegemony, as well as how all of these relate to libraries, librarianship, and library work. Throughout the book, Popowich connects AI as a cultural text to notions of human capacities, capabilities, flourishing and justice. The book aims to provide library workers with a broader context from which analyze and navigate the rapidly-changing landscape of artificial intelligence in the twenty-first century.

Sam Popowich MLIS, PhD is an academic librarian at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. He researches and writes on libraries, politics, and technology, and is the author of two previous books from Library Juice Press/Litwin Books: Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship: A Marxist Approach (2019) and Solving Names: Worldliness and Metaphysics in Librarianship (2024). He received his PhD in political science in 2024 with a dissertation entitled The Cheapest Police: The Limits of Recognition and Intellectual Freedom in Canadian Libraries.