written sometime in the future by some form of artificial intelligence, mapping out the history of the preceding millennium. “We could imagine,” De Landa argued, “that such a robot historian would write a different kind of history than would its human counterpart.” Events that loom large in human accounts—the European conquest of the Americas, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Magna Carta—would be footnotes from the robot’s perspective. Other events that seem marginal to traditional history—the toy automatons that pretended to play chess in the eighteenth century, the Jacquard loom that
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