Worth a read: “AI and the Myth of the Machine,” Conor McGlynn, Compact, March 19, 2026.

McGlynn offers a compact summary of Lewis Mumford’s classic critique of the wholesale takeover of human civilization and culture by “the myth of the machine,” the unexamined fusion of assumed technological and economic imperatives under the banner of the sole supreme value of “efficiency.” And he applies this briefly to the contemporary cultural discourse surrounding artificial intelligence.

The final paragraph is worth quoting. This is McGlyn himself speaking, not a paraphrase of Mumford:

“Technological doom is not something that lies ahead of us. It has already arrived. The demise of humanity is an ongoing process by which we allow ourselves to be colonized by machine values, a ‘gradual disempowerment’ that is happening all around us. AI should be seen not as a race to a promised land but as a journey every farther away from human flourishing.”