Powered by Smart

Name: Powered by Smart
Price: 206 AUD
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ISBN: 9781479836376

A Prehistory of Everyday AI

Sarah Murray

$206

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

New York University Press
31 March 2026

Media studies; Feminism & feminist theory; Impact of science & technology on society; History of engineering & technology; Artificial intelligence

Series: Critical Cultural Communication

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.

By: Sarah Murray
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781479836376
ISBN 10: 1479836370
Series: Critical Cultural Communication
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 31 March 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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

Reviews for Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI

""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""