Jathan Sadowski

Jathan Sadowski is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Australia and a prominent critic of technology capitalism. He is the author of “Too Smart” (2020) and “The Mechanic and the Luddite” (2025), and co-hosts the political-economy-of-tech podcast “This Machine Kills.”

Potemkin AI

Sadowski’s most durable contribution to the AI debate is the idea of “Potemkin AI” — a façade of automation that conceals the low-paid human workers who actually do the labelling, moderation and, sometimes, the outright impersonation of the machine. He argues that “Potemkin tech constructs a façade that not only hides what’s going on but deceives potential customers and the general public alike,” letting companies raise money and evade accountability on the strength of intelligence they do not possess.

His broader critique, developed across the podcast and “The Mechanic and the Luddite,” is that the problem with AI is fundamentally about power, not the technology in the abstract: automation is deployed to discipline workers, extract data and concentrate capital. Sadowski reclaims the label “Luddite” as a considered political stance rather than a slur — a lineage shared with critics like Dan McQuillan and echoed by the writer Brian Merchant.