Smart Bombs and Sex Robots

Peter Nowak, a science and technology journalist for the CBC, has written a worthy successor to Swiss historian Sigfried Giedion’s 1948 classic Mechanization Takes Command. Interestingly, Nowak does not even mention Giedion, yet the basic ingredients are here: a magisterial overview of the remorselessness of technology combined with a thoughtful assessment of the economic consequences. Giedion had a comprehensive understanding of the history of mechanization, based on the primary sources of the day. Nowak, in his efforts to penetrate the intersections of elemental human needs and technology, has done a no less comprehensive search, much of it from internet postings and through interviews—and Nowak has done plenty of interviewing. He sets out to look at the technology of hedonism, as opposed to mechanization, as expressed in sex and food, tracing how the sex and food industries have been transformed by ideas originally generated by military research. This, amazingly...