MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)The book is urgent and wide-ranging, but it replaces the handpicked case study with selective narrative history ... Lepore is undoubtedly more interested in tracing the intellectual history of machine rule than in explaining its institutional underpinnings. The result is an often vivid and at times unsettling account ... Lepore has written an entertaining exploration tracing Silicon Valley’s self- image to the science fiction on which its architects grew up. Yet her narrative history often comes at the expense of the institutional questions her argument raises. She concludes by stating that knowledge of the past is essential, with which it is hard to disagree, but what exactly does the past teach us to do? The lessons she draws come down to: do not surrender judgement to machines. As counsel, this has appeal. As a guide to explaining or reversing institutional decay, environmental damage and democratic decline, it is less satisfying.
