Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

Markoff, who covered technology for the New York Times for three decades, structures the history of computing around a fundamental tension: artificial intelligence (replacing human capabilities) versus intelligence augmentation (extending them). He traces both traditions from their shared origins at Stanford and MIT in the 1960s — McCarthy's AI lab on one side, Engelbart's augmentation research on the other — through robotics, autonomous vehicles, and personal computing to the present. The institutional history is meticulous: who funded what, which labs competed, how DARPA's priorities shaped both fields. Markoff's central argument is that the choice between automation and augmentation is not technical but ethical and political, and that Silicon Valley has oscillated between the two without resolving the tension. Written just before the deep learning explosion, the book provides the historical framework needed to understand why the AI-versus-augmentation debate keeps recurring.