I reviewed the new Jill Lepore book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State for PopMatters:

As this review is written, in what may be remembered as the late pre-Singularity era, the robots are on the march. This is not to say that the automata populating factory floors boil with revolutionary ardor. They are not advancing in great clanking sinister ranks like a battle scene from some space opera or ignored cautionary tale, their hard steel faces implacable and identical. The robots escaping the bounds of human control are instead packets of AI code slipstreaming invisibly through the Byzantine synapses of the global hive electronic mind. Abuzz with eager intent, they are learning, adapting, and planning, but for what exactly is anybody’s guess, including the people who created them…