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.
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