The Machine Age and the Human Condition: Possible Futures

The Economics Democracy Initiative presents its Fall ’24 keynote, co-sponsored by the Levy Economics institute.

Lord Robert Skidelsky is giving a talk centered on his new book, The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning on November 19, 5 PM EST. 

Nearly a century ago, in the essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren’s generation would only need to be laboring a mere three hours a day, given the projected pace of technological change.

Skidelsky, Keynes’s biographer, explores why that has not come to pass. This leads him to a broader examination of how, with the intrusion of machines into our lives, “every increase in our own freedom to choose our circumstances seems to increase the power of technology to control those circumstances.”

The Machine Age is an ambitious survey of the impact of machines on humanity in its various aspects, peaceful and warlike, democratic and Orwellian, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.