The profound erosion of trust in the Digital City leaves a vacuum, and we look to our tools to fill it. We seem set upon interlocking trajectories: of ever greater swaths of the human experience being computationally managed, and of intractable human subjects increasingly breaking down or revolting against these conditions.

I’m happy to let my thermostat automatically turn my heat on and off or to let an AI drive a car or optimize the traffic lights in a city. I’m less sure about an AI that sets tax rates, or corporate regulations or foreign policy. Or an AI that tells us that it can’t explain why, but strongly urges us to declare war—right now

This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, “we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.”