Mindless: The Human Condition in the Machine Age

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.

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.