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Narrated by James Garnon
Mark O'ConnellUnabridged — 8 hours, 45 minutes
Narrated by James Garnon
Mark O'ConnellUnabridged — 8 hours, 45 minutes
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Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our bodies-our capabilities, intelligence, and lifespans-in the hopes that, through technology, we can become something better than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley billionaires and some of the world's biggest businesses.
In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost cryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall death. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implanting electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meets a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mankind from artificial superintelligence.
Where is our obsession with technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the technologies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressing these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, often laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human.
The book is a wonderful, breezy romp filled with the beginnings of philosophical reflections on the meaning of the techno-utopians' search for immortality, or as O'Connell puts it, "solving death."
11/07/2016
Transhumanism—defined here as “a liberation movement advocating nothing less than a total emancipation from biology itself”—is scrutinized in this compact, provocative exploration of the techniques and technologies currently being advanced to extend human intelligence and life spans. Slate columnist and debut author O’Connell takes an open-minded but skeptical approach to his subject as he leads the reader on a tour of modern facilities devoted to enhancing the human “meat machine”: cryonics storehouses that freeze brains and bodies for future resuscitation, whole-brain emulation labs studying the scanning and uploading of human consciousness, robotics researchers attempting to create simulacra capable of human function, cyborg “grindhouses” crafting renegade interfaces between the body and smart technology, and gerontology institutions that are trying to “cure” aging. O’Connell writes with an intellectual curiosity that makes his esoteric subject matter accessible to lay readers, and he tempers his observations with the existential anxiety that the concept of transhumanism evokes, as when he describes it as “an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay.” His book is a stimulating overview of modern scientific realities once thought to be the exclusive purview of science fiction. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners. (Feb.)
Winner of the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize • Shortlisted for the 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize
“Troubling and humorous, this is one of my current give-it-to-everyone books—I buy six copies at a time. Did you know our future belongs to a few asocial geeks for whom being human has always been a problem? Now they can solve it!"
—Jeanette Winterson, Vulture
“O’Connell… dissects the practices and beliefs of trans-humanism with extraordinary exuberance and wit… To Be a Machine is sometimes hilarious (triggering several bursts of uncontrollable giggles while I read it on the Tube) but even as O’Connell mocks the more absurd manifestations of trans-humanism he shows sympathy and understanding for its adherents.”
—Financial Times
“Wryly humorous, cogently insightful…. To Be a Machine is a lucid, soulful pilgrimage into the heart of what humanity means to us now—and how science may redefine it tomorrow, for better and for worse.”
—NPR.org
“Open-minded… With a practiced journalist’s sense of engagement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, O’Connell describes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifters, and con artists orbiting techno-optimist communities over the past half century…. Offer[s] much-needed critical analysis that never veers into condescension.”
—LA Review of Books
“O'Connell unleashes his prodigious researching and writing skills on what could be your future.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“O’Connell is a writer of elegant precision and winning facetiousness… His ear and eye for detail are prodigious… O’Connell’s writing—full of high-low swerves and personal asides—is a constant reminder of the bathetic reality of being human.”
—4Columns
“[O’Connell] reveals a bounty of beguiling ingenuity and genuine absurdity, eliciting laughs and empathy, because we are our most human while trying to become something more than human.”
—Playboy
"O'Connell, a columnist for Slate, is a charming, funny tour guide. Writing on transhumanism often gets swept away by the inherent drama of its adherents' promises, but O'Connell's eye for small human details…keeps the narrative grounded in a way that rigorous scientific debunking wouldn't.”
—Vice
"The game-changing technology being developed in Silicon Valley is often hard to wrap one's head around, and Mark O'Connell takes readers on a wild ride through this world in a way that makes one feel that anything is possible and everything is happening right now."
—Newsweek
"In this thoughtful and readable book, [O’Connell] aims to understand the motivations of those who are guided by the belief that technology will enable humans to transcend the human condition. In an attempt to explore what it means to think of ourselves as machines, O’Connell takes readers on an all-encompassing tour…He writes in an agreeable, conversational tone, offering his opinions, doubts, and fears along the way.”
—Undark
“O’Connell decides to dive into the transhumanist culture in the best way possible: by traveling the world in search of key figures in the movement… The result is a fast-paced travel-log-cum-existential inquiry into the science and the religious significance of this age-old human desire to live forever: To become, in effect, a god.”
—NPR’s 13.7 blog
“O’Connell, a journalist, makes his own prejudices clear: ‘I am not now, nor have I ever been, a transhumanist,’ he writes. However, this does not stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement.”
—Science
“O’Connell’s book is skeptical but not cynical, and it functions as a witty overview of transhumanism.”
—The Ringer
“O’Connell’s sensibility—his humanity, if you will—and his subject matter are a match made in heaven. It’s an absolutely wonderful book.”
—The Millions
“O’Connell has devised an indispensable GPS for negotiating today’s tomorrow-land.”
—Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
“Comedic, unsettling, ambivalent, and intriguing…O’Connell’s book is a worthwhile read for all audiences.”
—LitHub
“To Be a Machine is flat-out fascinating. O’Connell’s journey is a layman’s adventure through the technological looking glass, an opportunity to meet with a subculture existing on the fringes of the tech scene and a compelling peek at one possible future. Sharply-written and thought-provoking, To Be a Machine is a book that will undoubtedly set your mind to racing and your gears to turning.”
—The Maine Edge
“O’Connell writes with an intellectual curiosity that makes his esoteric subject matter accessible to lay readers…a stimulating overview of modern scientific realities once thought to be the exclusive purview of science fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly
"An enlightening tour of transhumanism… packed with eccentric characters…An unsettling but informative and sometimes-optimistic view of mostly legitimate efforts at life extension."
—Kirkus Reviews
“Readers will appreciate O’Connell’s sense of humor and his fast-paced writing, and will at times feel like they’re having a dialogue with the author as he ponders the ethics, consequences, and dilemmas of these transhumanist activities embedded in society today. Those who are interested in artificial intelligence, bioengineering, technology, and human development will find this book to be deeply engrossing and informative on the topic of transhumanism and what it means to be a human today and in the future.”
—Booklist
"A voyage into the dark heart of transhumanism, where dwell many hopeful mind-uploaders, robo-warfighters, subdermal implanters, doomed immortalists, and sundry aging Singularitarians. A funny, wise, and oddly moving book."
—Nicholson Baker, author of House of Holes and Human Smoke
“Hilarious and moving…. To Be a Machine is super-detailed and cosmic and minute and high-stakes and funny and sad, all at the same time.”
—Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed
“O'Connell, like some dream combination of Jon Ronson and Don Delillo, switches effortlessly from profound to poignant to laugh-out-loud funny. A brilliant illumination of the techno-future, To Be A Machine is also, and more importantly, a joyful summation of what it is to be human.”
—Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void
“O'Connell's forensic investigation of the unnervingly fluid border between the human and the machine is elegant and gripping: at once a hilarious anthropological survey of the people who believe technology will give us eternal life and a terrifying account of how technology is changing the cardinal features of human existence.”
—Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City and The Trip to Echo Spring
“Provocative, funny and not a little gonzo, it’s a great one to recommend to devotees of Jon Ronson”
—Bookseller (UK)
"Mark O'Connell, in funny, reflective prose, finds in the transhumanists a desire to exceed these very limits – of the capacity for thought, of death, of the body."
—Globe and Mail (Canada)
“[A] beautifully written book… Ultimately, To Be A Machine is both an insight into transhumanist thought and O’Connell’s very relatable fears and anxieties about morality and the future.”
—Irish Times
"To Be a Machine is an attempt to understand the transhumanist movement on its own terms… It’s O’Connell’s lack of stridency, as well as his often splendid writing, that makes him such a companionable guide.”
—The Guardian (UK)
“By exposing the ludicrous yet terrifyingly serious ideologies behind transhumanism, To Be a Machine is an important book, as well as a seriously funny one.”
—Sunday Times (UK)
“O’Connell invokes the twin spectres of death and child-bearing in an attempt to make sense of his subject—but he also manages to be staggeringly funny.”
—New Scientist (UK)
"[A] Homer’s Odyssey for the digital age.... A gentle, humorous and lovingly written book."
—The Times (UK)
2016-12-07
An enlightening tour of transhumanism, the movement dedicated to radically prolonging human life. In his first book, Slate book columnist and Millions staff writer O'Connell chronicles his travels around the world meeting and discussing transhumanism with the movement's aficionados. The narrative is packed with eccentric characters, but none subscribe to the far more popular commercial life-extension industry that promises immediate results. On the contrary, transhumanists aim to achieve their goals through genuine technical advances, including implants, genetic modification, prostheses, mind-uploading, and biohacking. Those who feel they've been born too soon will perk up at O'Connell's early chapter on Alcor, a cryopreservation facility where technicians will, for $200,000, carefully freeze your body upon death (just your head runs $80,000) and keep it until thawing, revival, and reconditioning become feasible options. Most governments and universities refuse to finance research aimed at immortality, but Silicon Valley billionaires, among others, are less inhibited. As such, O'Connell turns up plenty of freelancers with legitimate scientific backgrounds working on the problem as well as websites (Maxlife.org), organizations (Humanity Plus, described on its website as advocating "the ethical use of emerging technologies to enhance human capacities"), and even venture capital firms (Longevity Fund). Elderly readers may gnash their teeth, but others will have hope since many experts predict breakthroughs within decades. O'Connell does not claim to be impartial. He lets spokesmen have their say, explains their science for a lay audience, and does not conceal his amusement at wacky enthusiasts or his dismay at gruesome self-experiments. He also detours into robotics and artificial intelligence, which, once computers become smarter than humans, may render our perishable bodies irrelevant. Skeptics deliver thoughtful warnings, and O'Connell himself waxes hot and cold. An unsettling but informative and sometimes-optimistic view of mostly legitimate efforts at life extension.
| BN ID: | 2940169410426 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
System Crash
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "To Be a Machine"
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Copyright © 2017 Mark O'Connell.
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