If you’re not worried about AI fucking your shit up, I don’t know what to tell you. But what we can tell you is that this book is a bit of a trip. It touches on plenty of interesting anecdotes and historical oddities, but its lens of using literature to judge the past, present, and future of our artificial political and social structures is kind of like driving a hovercraft to work—functional and neat on paper, but ultimately there are way better ways to get the job done.

Jill is a historian, and it’s in the historical examples where she genuinely shines. The vignettes about mobs of grey people who outsourced their entire lives to bland logic decades ago was news to all of us. The full depth of how sci-fi has quietly shaped the thinking of generations was also a fun diversion.

But then the framework starts to fray. Her lens on the current and future impact of AI and digitization on social and political structures falls a bit flat. While the arrows hit the dartboard, they definitely missed the bullseye.

There are punchier books out there about AI and its actual impact on the world, but if you’re looking for some cool historical narratives to drop at your next dinner party, this one might be right up your alley. The author should stick to her strong suit—which is history, not explaining Skynet or predicting tomorrow.