In her review of Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford and Shadow Work by Craig Lambert—both new nonfiction texts that explore the subtle involvement of technology in our everyday lives—New York Times writer Barbara Ehrenreich considers whether robots could take over her book-reviewing job, and do it better.

She ruminates on what the process might be: “First, the job of ‘close reading,’ now commonly undertaken with Post-its and a felt-tip red pen, will be handed off to a scanner that will instantly note all recurring words, phrases, and themes. Next, where a human reviewer racks her brain for social and historical context, the review-bot will send algorithms out into the ether to scan every other book by the author as well as every other book or article on the subject. Finally, all this information will be synthesized with more fairness and erudition than any wet, carbon-based thinking apparatus could muster.”

“This is a humbling book,” Ehrenreich adds.

But Ehrenreich’s thought experiment begs the question of whether a neutral review is really the ideal to strive toward. As Mark Krotov writes at the Moby Lives blog, some book review editors have particular policies on the reviewing process; New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained that writers who have “written short pieces of laudatory copy for promotional purposes” are ruled out as reviewers, but that a personal connection might not be a negative.

“It comes down to ‘who would you want to read on this?’ ” Paul said.

Also, a reader could indeed miss out on substantive criticism because of a relationship, argues Krotov, citing a review of Caleb Crain’s The Wreck of Henry Clay by Marco Roth. The review, in Krotov’s words, is “brilliant, perceptive, and avowedly un-neutral—and all the better for it.”