The metrology of intelligence pioneered in the late nineteenth century, with its implicit and explicit agenda of social and racial segregation, still operates at the core of AI to discipline labor and replicate productive hierarchies of knowledge. The rationale of AI is therefore not only the automation of labor but the reinforcement of these social hierarchies in an indirect way. By implicitly declaring what can be automated and what cannot, AI has imposed a new metrics of intelligence at each stage of its development. But to compare human and machine intelligence implies also a judgement about which human behavior or social group is more intelligent than another, which workers can be replaced and which cannot. Ultimately, AI is not only a tool for automating labor but also for imposing standards of mechanical intelligence that propagate, more or less invisibly, social hierarchies of knowledge and skill. As with any previous form of automation, AI does not simply replace workers but displaces and restructures them into a new social order.