Powered by Smart
A Prehistory of Everyday AI

Sarah Murray (Author)

9781479836376

Hardback, published 31 March 2026

336 pages, 42 b/w images
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.646 kg

"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

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.