BOOK REVIEW: Mindless (The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)

By Robert Skidelsky. Other Press, New York. Hard cover, 373 pp with bibliography and index. US$29.99

Ten thousand years ago, according to the distinguished British economic historian Robert Skidelsky, human brains were fully formed and about as advanced as they are today. But it took millennia to go from bows and arrows to machine guns. There were thousands of years in which there was no technological progress at all.

Dynamism, he writes in this history…