The balance of power between humans and machines

The twin poles of the modern imaginarium about technology and society can be represented by two masterpieces of popular culture. In James Cameron’s film The Terminator (1984) and its sequels, a global computer system called Skynet becomes sentient and proceeds to try to exterminate the human race by means of time-travelling Austrian bodybuilders. In Iain M. Banks’s ‘Culture’ novels, by contrast (beginning with Consider Phlebas, 1987), a space-faring humanlike species has created superintelligent machines, known as Minds, which automate all the labour of production, leaving people free to pursue artistic activities and extreme sports. As our tech-bro overlords race to create proper AI, then, the present question is whether engineered superintelligence will lead to annihilation or fully automated luxury communism.

It takes the eminent economist Robert Skidelsky quite a while to arrive at this question, and he mentions Banks only in passing (in a dismissive reference to the fact that the novels have inspired Elon Musk), and The Terminator not at all – which is strange since ‘building Skynet’ has become acknowledged shorthand for the dangers of creating a superintelligent computer system, supposing that is possible. Skidelsky, though, takes it to be obvious that it isn’t: ‘Science tells us that we cannot create such a being.’ No it doesn’t: since true AI does not yet exist, the only science of it is the draft version being written for the first time by those trying to create it.

What The Machine Age aims to be, instead, is 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. It starts with the complaint that ancient Greece ‘produced philosophers, not scientists’ – a proposition that is both terminologically anachronistic and false, at least if you suppose that proving the Earth is spheroid or accurately measuring the distance from the Earth to the Moon count as science.