The Secret Life of Puppets, by Victoria Nelson <br></br>Living Dolls, by Gaby Wood

From robot dolls to cyborgs, humans have dreamt of artificial intelligence. Pat Kane says that this urge has more to do with metaphysics than mechanics

As enduring quotations go, this one seems to be girding its loins for a very long life. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," Arthur C Clarke wrote in his 1972 science-fiction story "Report on Planet Three". Gaby Wood's Living Dolls uses it at the fulcrum of her exhaustive – and slightly exhausting – collection of mini-histories about our fascination with robots. I have always thought there was a missing end to the Clarke quote, though: it seems like magic only if you're performing it to credulous, untechnical fools.

Wood's tone throughout – that of a wryly distant, well-researched newspaper reporter, which is what she is – completes Clarke's phrase just as well. Whether relating Descartes' tragic love of mechanical dolls (he built one in the name of his dead daughter), observing the fiddly self-obsessions of roboticists in Japan or Boston, or charting android fads as distinct as Edison's Doll and the chess-playing "mechanical Turk", she maintains a cosy but steady superiority over this nerdish tendency in the human condition. She claims that each of these stories is "a fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human". Yet as the well-tooled paragraphs roll elegantly across the pages with the kind of Granta-esque equanimity that seems the default setting for British non-fiction, the last person whose perceptions you would ever expect to be challenged by anything is Wood herself.

The writer of The Secret Life of Puppets, however, seems to have been driven slightly post-human by the subject. By far the more original writer (and mind), Victoria Nelson in effect takes the Clarke line and brilliantly inverts its sense. That is: any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Where Gaby Wood sees an opportunity for some passable essay-writing, Nelson sees a looming civilisational crisis. Even as we cling to the Enlightenment virtues of democracy and techno-science, our pop imaginations are obsessed with golems, androids, fabulously powerful machines, in-humans and trans-humans of all kinds.

No matter how much we officially expect our physical universe to behave like clockwork, we keep dreaming of matter invested with spirit. Whether it's the mud creatures of The Lord of the Rings or the artificial boy in AI, the Pokemon shape-shifters of kids' culture or the semi-alive computer games played by maturing Generation-Xers, in our cultural lives, at least, we are all Platonists now.

In the age of "cut and copy, morph and paste" (whether the substance is biological or digital), we are beginning to expect that the material world is not just endlessly susceptible to our own wills, but may have secret laws and agendas of its own.

Rather than wring her hands at this creeping "techgnosis", as the dark clouds of occultism and the New Age mystify the operations of technology, Nelson makes some uncommonly intelligent points about the limits of scientism. "We should never forget how utterly unsophisticated the tenets of 18th-century rationalism have left us, believers and unbelievers alike, in that complex arena we blithely dub 'spiritual'," she writes.

"We forget that Western culture is equally about Platonism and Aristotelianism, idealism and empiricism, gnosis and episteme, and that for most of this culture's history one or the other has been conspicuously dominant – and dedicated to stamping the other out."

Well said. For some, Nelson's plea that we should recognise our current moment as a new version of the Renaissance – when the empirical and the transcendental co-existed in a fruitful tension – may go too far. Shakespeare may have believed in the music of the spheres, but that doesn't mean we should (again). Yet as each advance in techno-science takes us by surprise, one could hardly be blamed for trying to find new ways to react to these transformations – something other than the bottom-line fetishism of business culture, the phobic fears of eco-Luddites, or the endless pettifogging of professional ethicists. How much more "gnostic" – the idea that godliness is embedded within everything – is the news that Intel is going to put a tiny radio transmitter in every chip it manufactures?

From euro banknotes to prisoners on release, every object and subject will soon be embedded with some kind of communication element, trackable by a pervasive net of computers. Nelson's point about our spiritual illiteracy is that we can react to that kind of techgnosis only with dark dreams of totalitarian nightmare. We presume that such a level of post-humanity can only lead us all to enslavement by external control. The Matrix meets 1984, on the way to The Truman Show.

Is this yet another tragic example of human ingenuity reducing human autonomy, the snake of our rationalist intelligence eating its own tail? Or is it a genuine failure of imagination – a paranoid presumption that this increasingly dense web of humans and machines will reduce our potential, rather than a faith that we can shape these systems to generate endless new possibilities?

It's fascinating that the figure of the cyborg pops up at the end of Empire, the current bestselling anti-capitalist tome from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – a book that has put the wind back in the sails of the left, through its faith that technology will liberate the minds and souls of the worker. That can happen, say Negri and Hardt, only when the worker embraces the soft machines of the information age and admits that the age of alienation is truly over. Networks and computers can extend our subjectivity, as well as turn us into objects.

Though it has come too late for her book, Nelson would recognise the transcendental impulse in Empire, its invocations of "irrepressible joy" and its advocacy of the radical piety of St Francis of Assisi. They are kindred visionaries.

Back down in the foothills of polite writing, a few sections in Wood's book begin to rise from the general trainspotting. She writes about Wolfgang Von Kempelen's chess-player. In this great ruse played on late-18th-century Europe, a giant wooden "Turk" defeated chess masters across the continent, with a real human player secreted within its bowels. Noting that the operators often went mad, Wood neatly asks: "Can a machine think? Only, you might say, if a man relinquishes the ability to think... In the game of artificial intelligence, the only true loser might be human reason."

Jean Baudrillard might counter with his own aphorism, that "the problem with artificial intelligence is that there is not enough artifice in it." One searches in vain for moments when Wood's doughty research may embolden her to a few flights of theory.

It has been done: Sadie Plant's scintillating Zeros and Ones combined close documentation of the career of Eva Babbage with the most original speculations about the cyborg condition. But, as Nelson says, "We get into trouble when we expect the empirical to do the work of the transcendental." Too much humanity can spoil a book about post-humanity something rotten.

Pat Kane's 'The Play Ethic: living creatively in the new century' will appear this year from Macmillan