Shoshana Zuboff

Shoshana Zuboff

An American social psychologist and Harvard Business School professor emerita whose 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism named an economic logic rather than a technology: the capture of "behavioural surplus", data left over from people's use of services, and its refinement into predictions of future behaviour sold to third parties. Her earlier In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988) had already studied how computation restructures work. She argues that the resulting "instrumentarian power" shapes behaviour rather than merely observing it, which sets the political stakes for how AI training data is gathered. (See also: Surveillance capitalism, Training data, Kate Crawford)