July 29, 2024
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.
Starred review from September 1, 2024
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.
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October 18, 2024
Noted British political economist Skidelsky (emeritus, Univ. of Warwick) is known for his three-volume biography about John Maynard Keynes. Inspired by "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," an essay Keynes published in 1930 that predicted technology would enable people to need only a 15-hour work week, he wondered how Keynes could have erred so completely. Skidelsky's exploration traces the ever-increasing entrapment of humans by modern technology and capitalism. He argues that the internet is a gateway of knowledge, and those who control that gateway are the ones with power and money. He asserts that modern technology has led to what he calls a heaven (sufficient jobs, freedom, and more) or hell (privacy and surveillance issues or fewer jobs) relationship with machines. His book warns that technology could bring the four anthropogenic horsemen of the apocalypse: nuclear proliferation, worsening global warming, more pandemics, and network dependency. But the author also urges readers to consider the civilizations that aren't driven by machines; they have much to teach the rest of the world. VERDICT This thought-provoking book makes readers think about how much they're willing to rely on machines in the future.--Caren Nichter
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