By James Bridle, from New Dark Age, which was published this month by Verso. Bridle is a writer and artist.

Here’s a story about how machines learn. Say you are the US Army and you want to be able to locate enemy tanks in a forest. The tanks are painted with camouflage, parked among trees, and covered in brush. To the human eye, the blocky outlines of the tanks are indistinguishable from the foliage. But you develop another way of seeing: you train a machine to identify the tanks. To teach the machine, you take a hundred photos of…