Joan Muysken Lecture | The Human Condition in the Age of Machines | Prof. Robert Skidelsky

In the past, humans used machines, but did not live in a machine age. In other words, machines did not determine their conditions of life. These conditions barely changed over thousands of years. Today, we depend on machines for the way we work, the way we think, and the way we live. The machine age has come in a rush. It raises three questions. How and why has it come about? What has been its effect on the human condition? And what influence, if any, do we have on the further ‘march of the machines’? This lecture addresses these three questions.

Robert Skidelsky is emeritus professor of political economy at Warwick University. His numerous, award-winning books include Keynes: The Return of the Master (2010), a discussion of John Maynard Keynes and the urgent relevance of his ideas in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and How Much is Enough? The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life (2012), co-written with his son Edward Skidelsky. A member of the House of Lords since 1991, Skidelsky was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. In 2018, he published Money and Government, in which he argues against the orthodoxy of small-state neoclassical economics in favour of Keynes’ “big idea”. His most recent book, What's Wrong with Economics?, was published in 2020.

This lecture is organised by the School of Business and Economics (SBE) and Studium Generale. The Joan Muysken lecture has been named after Joan Muysken, SBE’s first professor of macroeconomics (1984-2014), who was the founding father of the department of Economics at SBE.