Andrei
A collaborator attempts to whitewash their actions and pretend, likely to themselves, that they aren't propping up an evil machine. Anyone lacking self awareness while serving a callous and destructive leader could have written this generic and bland book as a way to soothe their conscience. If Trump is the danger that the author claims he is, and the book is very inconsistent on this, claiming at times that Trump would never leave office while at other times that we should support him as the president, why would anyone work for him to ensure that his policies go through and that he continues to hang on to power. The author(s) claim to have a background in history, but they ignore the most basic lessons of political history: a large number of corrupted collaborators always prop up a smaller and evil leadership.
Racist, narrow, ahistorical, shallow, and lazy.
This book is disappointing and intentionally mismarketed. I doubt most people would read it after an honest description. The vast majority of the book is just looking at the same Greek myths over and over again reinterpreting them in absurd and ahistorical ways. There's just about one chapter to do with technology or machines here. Otherwise it's only myths and only Greek myths, as if there was nothing else in the ancient world.
Pretending that nothing else exists and that you can write and market a book about general ideas shared across societies like this and only use Greek myths is shameful and frankly racist. Even the small amount of text to do with China and India (a few paragraphs) implies that all their ideas on machines came from the West.
The book is so committed to its narrow minded and racist ideology that it goes to absurd lengths. Even the most trivial examples, of say, Japanese manga are carefully chosen to be those that are set in the West, and designed to make it seem as if the genre originated there. A cursory look on Wikipedia shows one how ridiculous this is.
I won't even comment on how misguided and poorly researched the last chapter that attempts to connect with AI is.
This book twists facts, makes them up, and then completely baseless speculation as fact about the past in order to push the author's story & agenda. There's no evidence for most of the story in the book. For example, the idea that we have any clue about the daily agenda, thoughts, skills, and education of some hominid 2 million years ago or 50,000 years ago is absurd. Facts everywhere are twisted to fit the story, like the history of colonialism which is whitewashed to be seen as a natural consequence of the scientific prowess of the colonizers. Or the fact that racism today is downplayed as cultural rather than based on skin color.
A book of wildly varying quality with a huge amount of repetition (one could easily cut out 1/3rd of the book without losing any content). It's a collection of independent chapters about about half of which are good.
Chapter 13 by Lynette A. Hart and Mariko Yamamoto was notably so bad I wanted to throw out the book and give it 1 star. It's a mixture of infantile observations – like the fact that dogs are good companions because they can't speak so they can't offer opinions, how deep! – and ablist views of people with disabilities.
