New Dark Age by James Bridle review – technology and the end of the future

I like to think that while I may have misgivings about much of what the current technological revolution is visiting on us, I yet manage to resist that dread ascription "luddite". It's one Bridle also wishes to avoid; but such is the pessimism about the machines that informs his argument, that his calls for a new "partnership" between them and us seem like special pleading. As futile, in fact, as a weaver believing that by smashing a Jacquard loom he'll stop the industrial revolution in its tracks. If we're in ignorance of what our robots are doing, how can we know if we're being harmed? At the core of our thinking about new technology there lies, Bridle suggests, a dangerous fallacy: we both model our own minds on our understanding of computers, and believe they can solve all our problems – if, that is, we supply them with enough data, and make them fast enough to deliver real-time analyses.