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The Human Condition in the Machine Age
by Robert Skidelsky
This sweeping history of humanity's relationship with machines illuminates how we got here and what happens next, with AI, climate change, and beyond.
Faith in technological fixes for our problems is waning. Automation, which promised relief from toil, has reactivated the long-standing fear of job redundancy. Information technology, meant to liberate us from traditional authority, is placing unprecedented powers of surveillance and control in the hands of a purely secular Big Brother. And for the first time, artificial intelligence threatens anthropogenic disaster—disaster caused by our own activities. Scientists join imaginative writers in warning us of the fate of Icarus, whose wings melted because he flew too close to the sun.
This book tells the story of our fractured relationship with machines from humanity's first tools down to the present and into the future. It raises the crucial question of why some parts of the world developed a "machine civilization" and not others, and traces the interactions between capitalism and technology, and between science and religion, in the making of the modern world.
Taking in the peaks of philosophy and triumphs of science, the foundation of economics and speculations of fiction, Robert Skidelsky embarks on a bold intellectual journey through the evolution of our understanding of technology and what this means for our lives and politics.
"A mixed bag, more successful as historical description than cultural criticism." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In pithy, aphoristic prose…Skidelsky serves up some unsettling insights." —Publishers Weekly
"A grand history of 'the mechanical philosophy,' applied to work and society, as it began in Europe and was exported to the rest of the world…an elegant story about the emergence of capitalism from feudalism and the subsequent technological explosion." —The Spectator (UK)
"A warning from history about the dangers not only of techno-hype but also of overreliance on standard ways of understanding and interacting with machines…That is certainly needed." —Literary Review (UK)
"Skidelsky demolishes the oft-touted reassurance that 'With suitable education and training workers will be able to take on higher-level…tasks in any job, whilst the more menial tasks will be taken up by machines' by marshalling compelling arguments…an informative, engaging and sweeping treatise on humanity's millennia-long relationship with technology." —Society of Professional Economists
"AI may feel different, but modernity has been one long struggle over how technology has shaped the human condition. Robert Skidelsky draws on history and philosophy, theology and literature to shed light on our current cultural moment and to show, with both wit and sophistication, how we can understand and navigate our 'machine age' without losing our humanity." —Nick Spencer, coauthor of Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity
This information about Mindless was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received the Wolfson Prize for History, the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations, and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations, and in the words of Norman Stone "should be given a Nobel Prize for History if there was such a thing." Skidelsky is also the author of Politicians and the Slump (1967); Oswald Mosley (1975); Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009); with his son, Edward, How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life (2012); Britain Since 1900: A Success Story? (2014); and Money and Government: A Challenge to Mainstream Economics (2018). He was made a life peer in 1991 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think the university stifles writers...
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