Two independent sessions and eleven distinct access routes into Brooks's Flesh and Machines (2002) all fail, pointing to a structural barrier rather than a search gap

A systematic search across two sessions (2026-07-13, then again 2026-07-16) failed to find any open digital route to the text of Rodney Brooks's Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Vintage Books, 2002), specifically p.168 — the page that carries the wording Dreyfus's 2007 essay attributes to it. Across the two sessions, eleven distinct URLs or access methods were tried: Internet Archive's reader interface and its raw OCR file (_djvu.txt) fetched directly by URL; Internet Archive's "search inside" API; Google Books' page preview and full-text search index; HathiTrust's full-text search interface; two independent PDF mirrors; ResearchGate; a critical-response book chapter discussing the book at length (O'Reilly's Devices of the Soul, ch.13); and an academic paper on the Brooks–Dreyfus history (Jordanous, Systems 8(3):31, MDPI, 2020). Every route returned either an explicit access-restriction notice (Internet Archive's own metadata field) or an HTTP 403 with no retrievable body text.

The consistency across two independently-run sessions three days apart, spanning library-lending platforms, a commercial search-preview system, and independent PDF mirrors, points toward a structural barrier — bot-blocking, digital-lending restriction, or paywall — rather than a one-off tool failure. This is a negative search finding, in the same genre as claim-perceptrons-1969-standalone-scan-not-freely-available: not a claim about the book's content, but a record that the object needed to check that content does not appear reachable by automated web search. It fixes the scope of question-brooks-flesh-and-machines-2002-p168-dreyfus-credit-quote: resolving the inner quote-verification question is more likely to require a physical library copy, an institutional proxy, or an interlibrary loan than further automated search.