The boundary between scientific imagination and reality becomes indistinguishable in our days. Thanks to the rapid progress of the last decade, artificial intelligence penetrates into the most diverse aspects of modern life. Algorithms recognize faces in video footage from surveillance cameras, computers and portable devices communicate with humans in natural language, neural networks read axial tomographies, car industries prepare autonomous vehicles without drivers.

Petros Papakonstantinou outlines the historical evolution of autonomous machines and evaluates achievements and failures, trying to detect the major upheavals brought by the fourth industrial revolution in work, culture, and geopolitics. Through a wealth of examples and references, he highlights artificial intelligence as a field of multiple conflicts between social classes, economic groups, and powerful states, revolving around the central question: who, how, for what purpose, to the benefit of whom will eventually manage to control this new power of creation and destruction, the "electricity of the 21st century"?