Abstract
Artificial intelligence is reorganising the material, social, and epistemic foundations of the contemporary world. This chapter places this synchronic techno-scientific breakthrough, marked by generative and agentic systems, mass behavioural data extraction, and an unprecedented fusion of state power and capital, within a diachronic unravelling of the history of technology and science. Unlike previous industrial revolutions, which mechanised muscle and coordinated energy, AI digitalises cognition itself. It constitutes a possible qualitative rupture rather than a mere cumulative advance. Through empirical examination spanning software engineering, biology, neuroscience, education, military systems, and media, it argues that comprehending the AI conjuncture demands a transdisciplinary epistemology positioned within the structured totality of capitalist modernity in its technoscientific, statist, labour, and social configurations.