-Joseph Wilson
The following is an (lightly edited) excerpt from Joseph Wilson’s forthcoming book Humans of AI: Understanding the People Behind the Machines to be published by University of Toronto Press in Spring 2026. Copyright Joseph Wilson 2025. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
“I picture the transistors as trembling bodies with translucent skin and fast, shallow breaths. They are utterly dependent on adults who cherish them for their extraordinary smallness and cosmic potential.” — Virginia Heffernan, Wired 2023
The Human Stack
If pundits in the media are to be believed, AI is on the cusp of transforming every aspect of human life: medicine, education, law, perhaps even rendering obsolete human labour. “Don’t get left behind!” CEOs are warned; “the future is here!” This kind of rhetoric positions AI as a force of nature, the next inevitable step jump in human progress. For this message to resonate, tech companies need to present their AI technologies as performing incredible feats of prediction, creation, and reasoning, completely unaided. But humans created every single piece of data that was used to create the AI models that made waves in 2023; they wrote the code that comprised the models; they nudged the models to make better decisions by telling them when they were right or wrong; they flagged offensive content that was in training data; and they designed the server farms and computer chips that ran the models. It’s not just the labour of a handful of people upon which the AI ‘tech stack’ has been built—it’s humans all the way down. It is this ‘human stack’ that gets ignored when we accept the myths spun by Silicon Valley.
Figure 1: An engineer in the NextChipAI lab solders components to a circuit board.
By listening to the people who work on this technology we can move towards a deeper understanding of what AI is and what it’s capable of. Instead of treating AI as inevitable and all-powerful, we can step back and try to understand it as a product of a particular place, at a particular time, and made by a particular group of people. From 2023 to 2025 I conducted fieldwork as an intern at a company in