His conclusion is echoed by the writer James Bridle, who has declared the era of cloud computing “the New Dark Age,” a regress to a time when knowledge could be obtained only through revelation, without true understanding.

Intellectual obsessions never really end; they can only be transposed.

“Nature’s silence is its own remark,” she writes, “and every flake of the world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”

It turns out that computers are particularly adept at the tasks that we humans find most difficult: crunching equations, solving logical propositions, and other modes of abstract thought. What artificial intelligence finds most difficult are the sensory perceptive tasks and motor skills that we perform unconsciously: walking, drinking from a cup,

All perception is metaphor—as Wittgenstein put it, we never merely see, we always “see as.” Whenever we encounter an object, we immediately infer what kind of thing it is by comparing it to our store of preexisting models. And as it turns out, one of our oldest and most reliable models is the human.

Privacy was a modern fixation, I said, and distinctly American. For most of human history we accepted that our lives were being watched, listened to, supervened upon by gods and spirits—not all of them benign, either.

As the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once put it, reality is “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Critics of the disenchantment narrative often argue that technical mastery of the world does not necessarily strip it of all magic, mystery, and awe; only an impoverished imagination will fail to find beauty in the revelations of science or ignore our capacity to discover, or invent, new sites of wonder.

In his 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation, Weber writes that “science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ” Science is so committed to describing the world objectively, he argued, without presuppositions, that it cannot even affirm its own intrinsic