
Powered by Smart
A Prehistory of Everyday AI
Sarah Murray(Author)
New York University Press
Published on 29. April 2026
Book
Hardback
336 pages
978-1-4798-3637-6 (ISBN)
Description
A critical feminist history of the techno-cultural evolutions that make AI possible
Powered by Smart traces the techno-cultural evolutions that made artificial intelligence feel more familiar than futuristic. From wearables and streaming platforms to home voice assistants and AI toasters, smart is an inescapable feature of postdigital life. Today, thousands of products and platforms define smart as routine automation and friendly digital kinship. Yet smartness was not always so digital. Sarah Murray uncovers the century-long process through which smart became synonymous with seamless interaction between bodies and machines, showing how this intimate interfacing helped to normalize today's algorithmic world.
Offering a critical, feminist prehistory of everyday AI, Powered by Smart reveals how the pursuit of convenience, comfort, and efficiency has long been a gendered campaign. Smartness has often been associated with women - from early switchboard operators and industrial designer Lillian Gilbreth's test kitchens to Jane Fonda's Jazzercise empire and Disney's computer-housewife PAT in Smart House. These moments illuminate how machine intelligence has already been made ordinary, and how the smart ideal was built over time through domesticity, discipline, and desirability.
Moving across factory floors, suburban kitchens, exercise trends, and digital homes, Murray shows how twentieth-century innovations in wearability, solutionism, and recognition laid the groundwork for our contemporary tolerance of - and attachment to - AI. Far from a sudden technological revolution, everyday AI emerged through decades of cultural conditioning of smart life as a caring, attentive endeavor that cast human-machine harmony as both natural and necessary. Powered by Smart reframes artificial intelligence not as the next frontier of progress, but as the logical extension of a much older dream of efficiency made ordinary and personal.
Powered by Smart traces the techno-cultural evolutions that made artificial intelligence feel more familiar than futuristic. From wearables and streaming platforms to home voice assistants and AI toasters, smart is an inescapable feature of postdigital life. Today, thousands of products and platforms define smart as routine automation and friendly digital kinship. Yet smartness was not always so digital. Sarah Murray uncovers the century-long process through which smart became synonymous with seamless interaction between bodies and machines, showing how this intimate interfacing helped to normalize today's algorithmic world.
Offering a critical, feminist prehistory of everyday AI, Powered by Smart reveals how the pursuit of convenience, comfort, and efficiency has long been a gendered campaign. Smartness has often been associated with women - from early switchboard operators and industrial designer Lillian Gilbreth's test kitchens to Jane Fonda's Jazzercise empire and Disney's computer-housewife PAT in Smart House. These moments illuminate how machine intelligence has already been made ordinary, and how the smart ideal was built over time through domesticity, discipline, and desirability.
Moving across factory floors, suburban kitchens, exercise trends, and digital homes, Murray shows how twentieth-century innovations in wearability, solutionism, and recognition laid the groundwork for our contemporary tolerance of - and attachment to - AI. Far from a sudden technological revolution, everyday AI emerged through decades of cultural conditioning of smart life as a caring, attentive endeavor that cast human-machine harmony as both natural and necessary. Powered by Smart reframes artificial intelligence not as the next frontier of progress, but as the logical extension of a much older dream of efficiency made ordinary and personal.
Reviews / Votes
"Powered by Smart is a brilliant excavation of how intelligence became embedded in the fabric of daily life - Sarah Murray unpacks the cultural circuitry of 'smartness' with nuance, wit, and a critical eye for the everyday. This book is essential reading for anyone curious about how AI became quietly ordinary, wearable, and intimate in the span of a few decades. Murray's scholarship bridges history and lived experience, revealing the social scaffolding beneath our most mundane technologies. A must-read for researchers, designers, and anyone invested in the future of intelligent systems." - Mary L. Gray, co-author of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass"It's hard to think of an aspect of life today that isn't subject to 'smartification.' Powered by Smart offers a crucial lens for understanding how new technologies like AI are made 'normal', with a thorough, lively, and beautifully written technological history. With this book, Sarah Murray has made an important and much-needed contribution to the interdisciplinary study of technological innovation in everyday life." - Jean Burgess, author of Everyday Data Cultures
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
42 b/w images
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-4798-3637-6 (9781479836376)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Sarah Murray is Associate Professor in Film, Television, Media and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan and co-editor of Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps