Mindless - by Robert Skidelsky (Hardcover)

About the Book

Originally published in 2023 in Great Britain by Allen Lane as: The machine age: an idea, a history, a warning.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Skidelsky, a British economist, draws on literature, political philosophy, history, and cultural developments in this brooding meditation on the rise of artificial intelligence. The promise of a better world, he warns, 'is open only to a tiny minority.'" --New York Times Book Review

"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

"Will technology liberate us, or further enslave us? That's the big question underlying this treatise on machines and their discontents." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Skidelsky's exploration traces the ever-increasing entrapment of humans by modern technology and capitalism...This thought-provoking book makes readers think about how much they're willing to rely on machines in the future." --Library Journal

"In pithy, aphoristic prose...Skidelsky serves up some unsettling insights." --Publishers Weekly

"A thoughtful reflection on the role of technology in the development of Western civilization and its implications for humanity's future. Skidelsky...comfortably displays his erudition in disciplines that include history, economics, politics, philosophy, and literature." --Shelf Awareness

"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

"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

About the Author

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.