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“This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
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.
“This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
System Crash
All stories begin in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about the desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other than the animals we are. In our oldest written narrative, we find the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who, distraught by the death of a friend and unwilling to accept that the same fate lies in store for him, travels to the far edge of the world in search of a cure for mortality. Long story short: no dice. Later, we find Achilles’ mother dipping him in the Styx in an effort to render him invulnerable. This, too, famously, does not pan out.
See also: Daedalus, improvised wings.
See also: Prometheus, stolen divine fire.
We exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendor. It was not supposed to be this way: we weren’t supposed to be weak, to be ashamed, to suffer, to die. We have always had higher notions of ourselves. The whole setup—garden, serpent, fruit, banishment—was a fatal error, a system crash. We came to be what we are by way of a Fall, a retribution. This, at least, is one version of the story: the Christian story, the Western story. The point of which, on some level, is to explain ourselves to ourselves, to account for why it’s such a raw deal, this unnatural nature of ours.
“A man,” wrote Emerson, “is a god in ruins.”
Religion, more or less, arises out of this divine wreckage. And science, too—religion’s estranged half sibling—addresses itself to such animal dissatisfactions. In The Human Condition, writing in the wake of the Soviet launch of the first space satellite, Hannah Arendt reflected on the resulting sense of euphoria about escaping what one newspaper report called “men’s imprisonment to the earth.” This same yearning for escape, she wrote, manifested itself in the attempt to create superior humans from laboratory manipulations of germ plasm, to extend natural life spans far beyond their current limits. “This future man,” she wrote, “whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”
A rebellion against human existence as it has been given: this is as good a way as any of attempting to encapsulate what follows, to characterize what motivates the people I came to know in the writing of this book. These people, by and large, identify with a movement known as transhumanism, a movement predicated on the conviction that we can and should use technology to control the future evolution of our species. It is their belief that we can and should eradicate aging as a cause of death; that we can and should use technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should merge with machines, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own higher ideals. They wish to exchange the gift, these people, for something better, something man-made. Will it pan out? That remains to be seen.
I am not a transhumanist. That much is probably apparent, even at this early stage of the proceedings. But my fascination with the movement, with its ideas and its aims, arises out of a basic sympathy with its premise: that human existence, as it has been given, is a suboptimal system.
In an abstract sort of way, this is something I had always believed to be the case, but in the immediate aftermath of the birth of my son, I came to feel it on a...
About the Author-
MARK O'CONNELL is Slate's books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker's "Page-Turner" blog; his work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Observer, and The Independent.
Reviews-
November 7, 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.
December 15, 2016 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.
COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
December 1, 2016 O'Connell, Slate's book columnist and contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Observer, and the Independent, writes pensively on the growing movement of transhumanism, the use of technology to enhance human physical, mental, and intellectual developments. O'Connell investigates this movement through his travels across the globe, from San Francisco to London, to meet with transhumanists in their homes, conferences, informal gatherings, and labs. From device implants to human cyborgs, O'Connell weaves his journey together via a series of encounters and discussions with transhumanists. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)
Jeanette Winterson, Vulture
"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!"
LA Review of Books
"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."
NPR's 13.7 blog
"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."
Science
"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."
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