Mindless Machines, Mindless Myths

Mindless Machines, Mindless Myths Erik J. Larson thinks about “Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” which traces Robert Skidelsky’s philosophical reckoning with AI, automation, and the illusion of progress. By Erik J. Larson August 2, 2025 Science & Technology Philosophy & Religion Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Robert Skidelsky . Other Press , 2024. 384 pages. BEGINNING IN THE 1960s, a generation of visionary engineers and theorists began sketching a new future—one organized not by hierarchies or institutions, but by networks. The emerging internet, and later the World Wide Web, was imagined as a radically democratic platform: bottom-up, decentralized, emancipatory. It would bypass entrenched systems of power—government, big business, old media—and open a new chapter in human communication, creativity, and knowledge-sharing. By the late 1990s, that vision reached a cultural crescendo. The July 1997 cover of Wired magazine declared the era the start of “the Long Boom,” promising 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and planetary improvement. It wasn’t merely optimism—it was conviction. The network would set us free. And yet the 21st century has so far unfolded in stark contradiction to that promise. The wealth gap has widened dramatically: the middle class has thinned, while precarious labor has surged. Productivity has stagnated even as digital technology has proliferated. We’ve fought two prolonged wars, endured financial collapse, and watched the web mutate from democratic commons into a gamified engine of manipulation and misinformation. The dream of a cooperative knowledge society has faded into an architecture of monetized attention and algorithmic control. Early attempts to revive that ethos—Web 2.0, the “read/write” web, the promise of user-generated content—briefly suggested a more participatory future. Platforms like digg and Reddit gamified content discovery; theorists like Clay Shirky heralded a “cognitive surplus” waiting to be channeled into collective creativity. But what emerged instead was not a renaissance of shared intelligence. By the mid-2010s, many of the early enthusiasts for the digital revolution—those who once saw the web as a force for democratization and creativity—had lapsed into uneasy acquiescence. The rhetoric of empowerment gave way to the reality of extraction. Shoshana Zuboff, long known for her measured analyses of technological change in the workplace, broke from that tradition with The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). The web, she argued, had not fulfilled its promise of decentralization; instead, it had become a pervasive infrastructure of manipulation. Digital technology had seeped into the daily rhythms and private corners of life, not as a liberating force but as a behavioral economy—dehumanizing in its logic, invisible in its operations, and totalizing in its ambition. This is the backdrop against which Robert Skidelsky’s Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2024) lands with weight. Where Zuboff exposed the mechanisms of capture—how our behavior became raw material for monetization—Skidelsky asks the more fundamental question: what does it mean for human beings to live in a “machine civilization”? He opens Mindless by observing that we no longer simply use machines—we now live inside a machine civilization. Machines no longer assist our lives from the outside; they increasingly define the conditions under which we think, work, and relate. And here Skidelsky joins a growing chorus of artists, poets, and writers in asking the big questions we once debated and wrote about—questions of meaning, purpose, and the conditions of human freedom. His concern isn’t just with jobs or privacy or misinformation, though these all appear in the book. It’s also with the subtle shift in what it means to be human when the architecture of daily life—how we work, relate, remember, even grieve—is increasingly determined by technical systems indifferent to context or value. We no longer simply use machines; we inhabit them. And Skidelsky wants us to see that we are doing so without having fully considered the costs. A British economic historian, public intellectual, and member of the House of Lords, Skidelsky is best known for his monumental three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. In Mindless, he draws on his command of economic history to address a different kind of crisis: not the collapse of markets but the erosion of meaning in an age of ubiquitous machines. He opens the book with a return to 1829, when Thomas Carlyle first announced the dawning of the “age of machinery” amid the chaos of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Carlyle, as Skidelsky notes, was among the first to grasp that humanity had crossed a threshold—not simply into an era of new tools, but rather into what he called a “machine civilization,” in which the conditions of life would be shaped increasingly by artificial systems. We are now living inside that civilization. “We humans are ‘wired up’ parts of a complex technological system,” Skidelsky writes. “We depend on this system for the way we fight, the way we work, the way we live, the way we think.” Rather than a book of hot takes or speculative hype, this is a work of intellectual archaeology, an attempt to explain our current technological confusion by recovering the ideas and historical shifts that brought us here. In a media landscape saturated with news-cycle churn and algorithmic chatter, Mindless is a welcome departure. It aims not to dazzle but to understand. And in doing so, it reminds us that the problems we now face—of automation, surveillance, and dehumanization—did not emerge in a vacuum. They have deep roots. If Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism asked how digital technologies have captured our behaviors and monetized our lives, Skidelsky asks a more elemental question: do these systems, and the visions that animate them, “affront some basic requirement of human flourishing”? Zuboff wrote in the language of platforms, policies, and behavioral economics. Skidelsky, by contrast, speaks as a philosopher and historian. He tells three interwoven stories, about how machines are changing the way we work, the way we live, and the shape of our future. Work, Leisure, and the Machine Civilization These stories are not wholly new, but Skidelsky situates them within a broader historical arc. The first, about labor, begins with Marx and the prospect of machines performing both physical and cognitive tasks once reserved for human beings. If technology can be perfected to manage medicine, navigation, education, and even design, what then becomes of work? The specter is not merely unemployment—it’s meaninglessness. Once freed from the burdens of labor, what do we do? Rather than Marx, however, Skidelsky turns to Keynes—who, in his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, famously predicted that within a few generations, technological advancement would reduce work to a few token hours a day, leaving us free to enjoy a life of leisure. Our few remaining duties, Keynes quipped, would be “to satisfy the old Adam in most of us.” It’s a charming vision—one that continues to echo in the pronouncements of Silicon Valley futurists—but Skidelsky isn’t buying it. In his view, Keynes made a crucial mistake: he “ignored the distinction between needs and wants.” Humans, Skidelsky reminds us, are not easily satisfied. They are driven not only by necessity but also by insatiable desires. And even if technology could eliminate work, it would not necessarily produce meaningful leisure. Free time, after all, is just as compatible with creative flourishing as it is with digital anesthetics—video games, TikTok, and basement nihilism. Work is more than a cost or burden; it is often the structure through which we understand ourselves. In this way, Mindless is a challenge to the ideological scaffolding that props AI and automation up—a set of Enlightenment myths about perfectibility, control, and the inevitable arc of progress. Skidelsky calls his book “over-ambitious,” but that ambition is precisely what distinguishes it. He dares to connect Marx and Keynes to DeepMind, to read the web as a distorted echo of 19th-century visions, and to treat our contemporary AI debates not as cutting-edge but as chapters in a much older story about human dependence on tools we don’t fully understand. The Apocalyptic Mood The historian Misha Glenny introduces us to “the Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse”: nuclear weapons, climate change, pandemics, and “dependency on network technologies.” As I write this on a laptop with a fast internet connection, occasionally checking my smartphone, it occurs to me that we’re in a daily flirtation with one of the horsemen, and anxiously watch the rest under the cloud of modernity. The “apocalypse” is, of course, a biblical concept, and involves a theory of history that begins with a fall and then toils ceaselessly under the watchful eye of God until the end of days. History has a beginning—that’s where we screwed things up in the Fall, and now we have to work and suffer pestilence, disease, and traffic jams. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it has an end too, a fiery one that’s finally resolved by the Second Coming of Christ. We still believe in the suffering, and we moderns still believe history is moving somewhere. History is an arrow. Where is it pointed? In the Marxist tradition, now parroted endlessly by the techno-futurist crowd, it is the coming utopia, the land of honey and milk, where robots do our work and we hang out, go fishing, and make love at all times of day. The fire-and-brimstone idea is a clear inheritance from thousands of years of Judeo-Christian thought, through Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, through the Reformation and the grim message of Calvinism: that heaven has limited seating capacity, and the only way we can be confident we’re “chosen” is by showing worldly success through hard Puritanical work. In the Christian version, the chosen go up to heaven after the forces of evil are vanquished. In the secular version favored by techno-futurists like Nick Bostrom and promulgated by everyone in Silicon Valley, the apocalypse doesn’t favor anyone in particular. We all die, or we are enslaved by future smart machinery. This is “the apocalyptic mood,” as Skidelsky rightly points to near the end of Mindless, in a chapter appropriately titled “Extreme Events.” As he puts it: “The apocalyptic mood arises from the feeling, and evidence, that our technology is leading us to disaster.” The anthropogenic risks of Glenny’s vision can be interpreted as a feature of advanced technology itself—we cannot destroy the world with a bow and arrow—or as a feature of us, of our foolish choices and our inability to adapt fast enough to, as Norbert Elias put it, “the development of technisation and its consequences.” Anyone familiar with recent television and film trends will confirm the modern mind’s obsession with catastrophe and apocalyptic futures—Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–25), HBO’s The Last of Us (2023– ), and early blockbusters like Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) all bear witness to our increasing fascination with the end of the world. Skidelsky points out, aptly, that the fall of communism left fiction writers and mythologizers without a perennial Orwellian plot. In its place, we have the Four Horsemen and the thematic weight of doomsday scenarios. Skidelsky’s second theme is neither the mushroom cloud of nuclear holocaust nor the runaway pandemic, but something equally surreal: the totalistic dysfunction of our technological infrastructure. Wall Street comes to a halt. The power goes out. The internet goes down, and suddenly there are billions of fingers poking the buttons of smartphones and laptops in vain. E. M. Forster’s brilliant novella The Machine Stops (1909) captures this vision well and presciently. This is the theme of “outages,” as Skidelsky puts it, and like the notion that we might push the nuclear button or let loose a superbug that extinguishes humanity, the machine “stopping” isn’t as fantastical as we might hope. Indeed, this sort of risk arguably keeps getting worse—as we continue to connect the world in layers of digital networks and computers, we keep upping the ante. Eventually, a small outage somewhere might ramify across the globe. The machine will stop. What then? Skidelsky’s third and final scenario centers on the rise of advanced cognitive technologies as the agent of our undoing. In my field—AI research—this is where most of the anxiety now resides. Enthusiasts and critics alike tend to imagine catastrophe in terms of technological autonomy: the AIs go rogue, develop agency, and decide they no longer need us. Or worse, they decide they don’t want us. Critics (count me among them) have pointed out for years that there is no evidence whatsoever for machines “coming alive.” The AI apocalypse narrative persists not because it is empirically grounded but because it taps into a much older mythology. Try as they might, even the most technically sophisticated versions of this scenario—with their talk of “alignment” and “superintelligence”—end up anthropomorphizing machines. They smuggle in a theory of mind while insisting they are just talking about optimization. Skidelsky traces this impulse back to literature: specifically, to a teenage Mary Shelley, writing horror stories with her husband and friends in a rented house in Switzerland. In Frankenstein (1818), Shelley gave voice to a growing fascination with science’s power to animate the inanimate. Galvanism was the background. The deeper idea was Faustian: what happens when we make something stronger, faster, or more intelligent than ourselves? Her creature was grotesque, misunderstood, and tragic. In the 20th century, we got HAL 9000: cold, rational, implacable. And in the 21st, we have AGI and ASI—acronyms for ideas (artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence) that sound increasingly theological. What unites these figures is not scientific rigor but cultural inheritance. They are projections, not predictions. These are the stories we reach for when we sense we’re losing control—over our tools, our institutions, even ourselves. In that sense, Skidelsky suggests, the AI apocalypse is best understood as a parable rather than a forecast: a reflection of our unease, our ambivalence, and the growing suspicion that we are building systems whose logic we follow but no longer comprehend. Skidelsky doesn’t end Mindless with prescriptions, and wisely so. The problems he surfaces are civilizational, not technological. They stem not from the machines themselves but from the stories we’ve told about them—and about ourselves. What he offers instead is a shift in posture: away from the intoxication of innovation and back toward the sobering work of understanding. If that sounds modest, it’s not. In a culture fixated on acceleration, remembering that history is not a straight line may be one of the most radical acts available to us. LARB Contributor Erik J. Larson is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (Harvard University Press, 2021) and writes about AI, philosophy, and culture. He is currently completing a second, co-authored book, Augmented Human Intelligence: Empowering Humans in an Age of AI, for MIT Press, and writes the Substack Colligo. Share Copy link to article LARB Staff Recommendations Removing Humans from the AI Loop — Should We Panic? Is AI a threat to humankind? Why Has Capitalism Run Out of Steam? Dominique Routhier ponders “Smart Machines and Service Work,” the new book by Jason E. Smith.