MINDLESS

Will technology liberate us, or further enslave us? That’s the big question underlying this treatise on machines and their discontents.

British economist Skidelsky begins by revisiting John Maynard Keynes’ prognostication that our smart machinery would free us to work only three hours or so a day—then noting that, alas, it hasn’t worked out that way. In a rather scattershot look at how we’ve failed to free ourselves, Skidelsky serves up Marx, Mumford, and Marcuse, along with Toynbee, St. Augustine, Arendt, et al. Sometimes he sounds exactly the right note, as when he identifies the unfortunate Greek inventor Icarus as the poster boy for hubris, “the attempt by humans to usurp the place of the gods in the scheme of life.” He is less convincing when he evokes pop culture, as when he calls Elon Musk “the Mad Max of the AI world.” (Mad Max was the good guy. If anything, Musk would probably self-identify as The Humungus.) Skidelsky rightly praises interdisciplinarity, but he’s at his best, if sometimes didactically so, when in his home fields of economics and history. On that ground, he writes interestingly of how Britain developed so rapidly as a tech nation because of both its non-predatory government (at least when not out gobbling up nations to build its empire) and its emphasis on property rights. He is less successful when on Jaron Lanier’s turf: the briar patches of AI and the philosophical implications of evolving machines. He may be too indulgent about the 1960s’ counterculture’s promise of the “transformation of human nature through sexual liberation,” though in closing the same sentence he hits on a hard truth: “Escape from the burden of work is open only to a tiny minority.” There’s good material here, but it takes burdensome work to get to it.

A mixed bag, more successful as historical description than cultural criticism.