Mindless: The Human Condition in the Machine Age

This knotty meditation from political economist Skidelsky (What’s Wrong with Economics) offers a conflicted and meandering take on the effects of AI. He argues that the technology could raise living standards and free humanity from busywork, but also risks subjecting daily life to invasive surveillance and making human labor redundant in fields as varied as accounting, translation, and truck driving. Skidelsky compares these potential developments to how previous eras of scientific and technological advancement affected humanity, contending that the Enlightenment substituted a mechanistic rationalism for older religious sensibilities, and that the emergence of industrial capitalism boosted productivity, but turned workers into strictly regimented machine-tenders. Skidelsky outlines his brooding apocalyptic warning in pithy, aphoristic prose (“The danger is not that robots become as intelligent as us, but that we become as stupid as robots”). Unfortunately, lengthy philosophical and literary detours into, for instance, Plato’s ideas about the perfectibility of society and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with its portrait of a monster created by science “run amok,” can make the volume feel unfocused. It’s a ramble, but Skidelsky serves up some unsettling insights along the way. Agent: Peter Matson, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Sept.)