The English inventor Charles Babbage is best remembered for his work designing the foundations for all digital computers with Ada Lovelace in the nineteenth century. What’s lesser known is why he wanted to build them. In the decades leading up to the British Empire’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1833 (which Babbage supported), there was a serious question of how to get free and rebellious industrial workers to produce enough to sustain the empire. Babbage’s answer was to surveil workers and divide their efforts into standardized, measurable tasks — a project he saw as a necessary step on the way to automating labor entirely.

Babbage didn’t invent these methods, as Meredith Whittaker, an artificial intelligence scholar who coled Google’s 2018 walkout, writes in a Logic(s) essay. Similar technologies of labor control were developed first on plantations to extract maximum labor from enslaved people, with management guides routinely circulating among British capitalists. “Babbage’s proto-Taylorist ideas on how to discipline workers are inextricably connected to the calculating engines he spent his life attempting to build,” Whittaker writes. Automation gave bosses a tool to replace striking workers and provided a disciplinary check, in Babbage’s words, “against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents.”

There’s a neat alpha and omega quality to computing: its ultimate effort, the Obsoleting Project — the industry’s drive to build machines that can do all our jobs — rhymes with its earliest. Should they work as intended, those machines would act as the tireless, pliant, cheap workers that bosses could previously only dream of. From Babbage to Bezos, managers have always resented the various ways that humans aren’t optimized for output — and therefore, their bottom line.