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The Machine Age
A sweeping history of and meditation on humanity's relationship with machines, showing how we got here and what happens nextWe live in a world made by machines; their development set its beat. This book tells the story of our relationship with machines from humanity's first tools down to the present and into the future. It charts the causes and courses of technological progress across epochs, revealing its impedances and accelerants, its interactions with capital and ascent to the first principle of the modern era.Tracing the promise of machines to liberate us from work and want and the accompanies threat of redundancy and subjection from ancient times to our own, Robert Skidelsky demonstrates how our creations not only reflect our ideas and ideals but also remake them. Taking in the peaks of philosophy and triumphs of science, the foundation of economics and speculations of fiction, he undertakes a fascinating intellectual journey through the evolution of our understanding of technology, and what this means for our lives and politics. It is an account that offers an escape from many assumptions about the potential and perils of machine learning and the technologies shaping the world now - and from the risks they pose to the future.
Hardcover
Published November 2, 2023
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About the author
Robert Skidelsky
68 books133 followersLord Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of the The World After Communism (1995) (American edition called The Road from Serfdom). He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He is chairman of the Govenors of Brighton College
Robert Skidelsky was born on 25 April 1939 in Harbin, Manchuria. His parents were British subjects, but of Russian ancestry. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, but released in exchange for Japanese internees in England.
From 1953 to 1958, he was a boarder at Brighton College (of which he is now chairman of the board of governors). He went on to read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and from 1961 to 1969, he was successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967, he published his first book, Politicians and the Slump, Labour Government of 1929-31, based on his D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in which British politicians handled the Great Depression.
During a two year research fellowship at the British Academy, he began work in his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley (published in 1975) and published English Progressive Schools (1969). In 1970, he became an Associate Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University. But the controversy surrounding the publication of his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley - in which he was felt to have let Mosley off too lightly - led John Hopkins University to refuse him tenure. Oxford University also proved unwilling to give him a permanent post.
In 1978, he was appointed Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick, where he has since remained, though joining the Economics Department as Professor Political Economy in 1990. He is currently Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
The first volume of his biography of John Maynard Keynes, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, was published in 1983. The second volume, The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (1992) won the Wolfson Prize for History. The third volume, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (2000) won the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Arthur Ross Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations.
Since 2003, he has been a non-executive director of the mutual fund manager, Janus Capital and Rusnano Capital; from 2008-10 he sat on the board of Sistema JSC. He is a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies and was the founder and executive secretary of the UK/Russia Round Table. Since 2002, he has been chairman of the Centre for Global Studies. In 2010, he joined the Advisory Board of the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, "Against the Current", which is syndicated in newspapers all over the world. His account of the current economic crisis, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published by Penguin Allen Lane in September 2009. A short history of twentieth-century Britain was published by Random House in the volume A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark in January 2010. He is now in the process of writing How Much is Enough? The Economics of the Good Life jointly with his son Edward Skidelsky.
Robert Skidelsky was born on 25 April 1939 in Harbin, Manchuria. His parents were British subjects, but of Russian ancestry. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, but released in exchange for Japanese internees in England.
From 1953 to 1958, he was a boarder at Brighton College (of which he is now chairman of the board of governors). He went on to read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and from 1961 to 1969, he was successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967, he published his first book, Politicians and the Slump, Labour Government of 1929-31, based on his D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in which British politicians handled the Great Depression.
During a two year research fellowship at the British Academy, he began work in his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley (published in 1975) and published English Progressive Schools (1969). In 1970, he became an Associate Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University. But the controversy surrounding the publication of his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley - in which he was felt to have let Mosley off too lightly - led John Hopkins University to refuse him tenure. Oxford University also proved unwilling to give him a permanent post.
In 1978, he was appointed Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick, where he has since remained, though joining the Economics Department as Professor Political Economy in 1990. He is currently Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
The first volume of his biography of John Maynard Keynes, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, was published in 1983. The second volume, The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (1992) won the Wolfson Prize for History. The third volume, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (2000) won the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Arthur Ross Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations.
Since 2003, he has been a non-executive director of the mutual fund manager, Janus Capital and Rusnano Capital; from 2008-10 he sat on the board of Sistema JSC. He is a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies and was the founder and executive secretary of the UK/Russia Round Table. Since 2002, he has been chairman of the Centre for Global Studies. In 2010, he joined the Advisory Board of the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, "Against the Current", which is syndicated in newspapers all over the world. His account of the current economic crisis, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published by Penguin Allen Lane in September 2009. A short history of twentieth-century Britain was published by Random House in the volume A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark in January 2010. He is now in the process of writing How Much is Enough? The Economics of the Good Life jointly with his son Edward Skidelsky.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 25, 2024
Some quotes that are useful: Work is about search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.
Optimist view to the machine age:
1) Great deal of technology is potentially job-enabling, rather than job-replacing
2) Technology enables the pie to grow faster than the population, creating new jobs by enlarging demand
3) Technology changes the nature of the pie, by producing a whole range of new goods and services unthought of in the past
4) Machine increase the choice people have between work and leisure (income vs. substitution effect)
With the general growth in prosperity has come all the benefits associated with it - decline in absolute poverty, greater longevity, less disease, and advances in literacy
Persimists
1) Lovely jobs at the top and lousy jobs at the bottom
Note: In the UK, vast majority of smaller companies shown little interest in introducing automated systems (2016).
2) Healthy employment data hide a few worrying trends
a) growth in underemployment
b) stagnation of mean wages
c) deterioration of work conditions
d) increase in proportion of low-skilled to total jobs
e) growth in number of public sector jobs
f) government subsidised jobs
g) growth in private debt
h) over-employment
i) growth in technology enabled job surveillance
A society made up of resentful gragments and disappointed hopes is the classic recipe for populist dictatorship
"rather than augmenting human creativity, machines may amplify human stupidity" - John Thornhill
Happiness become the new age's ethical goal, and technology its instrument (enabler).
"politics exists to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, and to mask the unendurable with fictions"
The real issue must be whether machine increase the freedom of users to choose their own plans of life, or whether they trap their users into systems imposed on them.
There is a direct link between technological utopianism and the degradation of culture. It is human imperfection which creates culture.
Fallibility is a necessary feature of human nature, there success in 'straightening the crooked timber' would lead to the extinction of hamanness as we know it.
Optimist view to the machine age:
1) Great deal of technology is potentially job-enabling, rather than job-replacing
2) Technology enables the pie to grow faster than the population, creating new jobs by enlarging demand
3) Technology changes the nature of the pie, by producing a whole range of new goods and services unthought of in the past
4) Machine increase the choice people have between work and leisure (income vs. substitution effect)
With the general growth in prosperity has come all the benefits associated with it - decline in absolute poverty, greater longevity, less disease, and advances in literacy
Persimists
1) Lovely jobs at the top and lousy jobs at the bottom
Note: In the UK, vast majority of smaller companies shown little interest in introducing automated systems (2016).
2) Healthy employment data hide a few worrying trends
a) growth in underemployment
b) stagnation of mean wages
c) deterioration of work conditions
d) increase in proportion of low-skilled to total jobs
e) growth in number of public sector jobs
f) government subsidised jobs
g) growth in private debt
h) over-employment
i) growth in technology enabled job surveillance
A society made up of resentful gragments and disappointed hopes is the classic recipe for populist dictatorship
"rather than augmenting human creativity, machines may amplify human stupidity" - John Thornhill
Happiness become the new age's ethical goal, and technology its instrument (enabler).
"politics exists to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, and to mask the unendurable with fictions"
The real issue must be whether machine increase the freedom of users to choose their own plans of life, or whether they trap their users into systems imposed on them.
There is a direct link between technological utopianism and the degradation of culture. It is human imperfection which creates culture.
Fallibility is a necessary feature of human nature, there success in 'straightening the crooked timber' would lead to the extinction of hamanness as we know it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 27, 2024
Frustratingly academic. Skidelsky pens an interesting account of the intellectual, philosophical and religious reasons of how Western civilization came to be the tech paradox that it is - a society on the brink of collapse because of its misuse of technology but doubling up on the idea that technology will save it. Yet by parotting other thinkers and books and not really offering anything else than this academic journey, you are left in the end with a two nagging questions. So what was the point of this book? What is Skidelsky actually trying to say? Not sure even he knows…
March 16, 2025
Difficult to read and I'm not sure it lives up to its promise of providing "an idea, a history, a warning". History is very prevalent, as are, oddly, book and film reviews. What I'm less clear about are the author's ideas or warnings.
August 24, 2024
Thought provoking, but not ground breaking
July 1, 2025
Since this book has such lame reviews, here’s mine:
First of all, if you’re the average crypto bro, you'll hate this book. Perhaps you'll feel better returning to your futile transhumanist goals and scoring some points in your favorite productivity app... Sadly, you are precisely the kind of person who should read this, but we know you won't =).
To be fair, the author drifts sometimes too far from "the machine age," only to come back and explain very briefly the current state of affairs. He sometimes gets lost in his arguments and is hard to understand why he is drifting; this is only because the ground the book tries to cover is too ambitious.
If one reads carefully, the goal of the book is to draw direct links from the early sources that developed into the "idea of progress in the west" all the way to the "futuristic goals of AI": this shows there is nothing but continuity in the proto-God pretentiousness that hides behind the "Artificial Intelligence project ".
The book promises three things, and it delivers:
- An Idea: the search for meaning has been the driver of human invention since prehistoric times. This includes the development of myths, a strong desire to understand death, and providing safety to society. These are the same goals that AI evangelists preach when justifying that the only way of salvation is through technological development.
- A History: most of the book is devoted to explaining how this development happened, mostly through the eyes of western development, but the author takes his time to clarify why in his view this is the case. There is a direct link between slavery-driven work (early greek-roman societies), colonialism + religious reformation (nothern-western European powers), Enlightenment + Industrial Revolution (the "western canon") and finally automation in modernity (technological globalization): the common denominator is how to optimize economic output. The way to achieve it is through propaganda and utopian dreams. Again, this long drift through history is entirely justified since it explains one of the main AI mantras: only technology can save us from the "curse of work" and "the curse of death" very primitive desires for what is worth. The book is also very good at pointing out that economic redundancy is mostly desired by elites and feared by the working classes because they are the ones who pay for the immediate trouble and do not see any immediate gains (even if it was the case that in the long term they will, however this is also debatable). This shows why the legitimacy of democratic governments is in crisis today..
- A Warning: This is mostly about the consequences of shaping everything in terms of optimization, with the logical, irrefutable outcome of dehumanization. It is not only about AI getting smart enough to replace humans but about humans getting dependent enough on tools and self-deprived of meaning enough to feel that everything they live for is mechanical work, and can be done by an automatic entity. If we are convinced that human redundancy is unavoidable, then this is a self-fulfilling prophecy for sure. More warnings about propaganda (both foreign and domestic), surveillance and why the State is so interested in promoting automation developments, for example: the West is now jealous of how much control China has over it's citizens, and how efficient this has made their economic output; so selling us the narrative of compete-or-perish is a sweet honey for western elites to preserve the global power they've accumulated through the centuries. Automation is for sure the elitist dream by excellence, but is it a Human dream? The author highly doubts so...
So, even though one can disagree with the author, a historic-economic take on how automation has affected human development and its relationship to work is very important for the current debate.
First of all, if you’re the average crypto bro, you'll hate this book. Perhaps you'll feel better returning to your futile transhumanist goals and scoring some points in your favorite productivity app... Sadly, you are precisely the kind of person who should read this, but we know you won't =).
To be fair, the author drifts sometimes too far from "the machine age," only to come back and explain very briefly the current state of affairs. He sometimes gets lost in his arguments and is hard to understand why he is drifting; this is only because the ground the book tries to cover is too ambitious.
If one reads carefully, the goal of the book is to draw direct links from the early sources that developed into the "idea of progress in the west" all the way to the "futuristic goals of AI": this shows there is nothing but continuity in the proto-God pretentiousness that hides behind the "Artificial Intelligence project ".
The book promises three things, and it delivers:
- An Idea: the search for meaning has been the driver of human invention since prehistoric times. This includes the development of myths, a strong desire to understand death, and providing safety to society. These are the same goals that AI evangelists preach when justifying that the only way of salvation is through technological development.
- A History: most of the book is devoted to explaining how this development happened, mostly through the eyes of western development, but the author takes his time to clarify why in his view this is the case. There is a direct link between slavery-driven work (early greek-roman societies), colonialism + religious reformation (nothern-western European powers), Enlightenment + Industrial Revolution (the "western canon") and finally automation in modernity (technological globalization): the common denominator is how to optimize economic output. The way to achieve it is through propaganda and utopian dreams. Again, this long drift through history is entirely justified since it explains one of the main AI mantras: only technology can save us from the "curse of work" and "the curse of death" very primitive desires for what is worth. The book is also very good at pointing out that economic redundancy is mostly desired by elites and feared by the working classes because they are the ones who pay for the immediate trouble and do not see any immediate gains (even if it was the case that in the long term they will, however this is also debatable). This shows why the legitimacy of democratic governments is in crisis today..
- A Warning: This is mostly about the consequences of shaping everything in terms of optimization, with the logical, irrefutable outcome of dehumanization. It is not only about AI getting smart enough to replace humans but about humans getting dependent enough on tools and self-deprived of meaning enough to feel that everything they live for is mechanical work, and can be done by an automatic entity. If we are convinced that human redundancy is unavoidable, then this is a self-fulfilling prophecy for sure. More warnings about propaganda (both foreign and domestic), surveillance and why the State is so interested in promoting automation developments, for example: the West is now jealous of how much control China has over it's citizens, and how efficient this has made their economic output; so selling us the narrative of compete-or-perish is a sweet honey for western elites to preserve the global power they've accumulated through the centuries. Automation is for sure the elitist dream by excellence, but is it a Human dream? The author highly doubts so...
So, even though one can disagree with the author, a historic-economic take on how automation has affected human development and its relationship to work is very important for the current debate.
September 16, 2025
Some good ideas here and there, but it was too discursive and not rigorous enough to get them off the ground. Every chapter started strong but slowly ran out of steam because Skidelsky got too busy quoting bits of literature that didn’t really seem to connected to what he was ever speaking about.
He also seemed to move far too casually though philosophical material without giving it the space to breathe. For example, he spends four sentences talking about Heidegger’s position on technology then moves on to something else, like he never spoke about Heidegger. This is a pattern throughout the book, and in a book about the relationship between humans and technology, this seems like a total misstep.
He also seemed to move far too casually though philosophical material without giving it the space to breathe. For example, he spends four sentences talking about Heidegger’s position on technology then moves on to something else, like he never spoke about Heidegger. This is a pattern throughout the book, and in a book about the relationship between humans and technology, this seems like a total misstep.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews