Book review: To Be a Machine

Don't bury the lead: It's a good book, you should read it.

To Be a Machine by Mark O'Connell is my favorite kind of non-fiction: narrative, episodic, ethnographic without all the pretentious academic words, free from dates and timelines. It's full of topics relative to my interests (death, language, religion), rooted mainly in journalism, and has some existential reflections sprinkled throughout for zest.

O'Connell is not a transhuman evangelist, nor a naysayer, simply a curious doubter. He wants to know what makes these people go, what drives their zeal and powers their ultimate optimism. In his search for understanding, he covers such diverse topics as cryogenics, body mods, the robot apocalypse, and running for president. Each fascinating subjects, and tying them together under the narrative of transhumanism gives us interesting context to further think about these complex topics.

Cryogenics becomes a meditation on religion and medicine: O'Connell describes the act of freezing your body in hopes (faith?) that science and tech will one day be able to resurrect you as a perfect, healthy being "the hopeful thanatolgy of cryonics."

The robot apocalypse becomes a chance to ponder the root of humanity. O'Connell reminds us that we are animals, though animals perhaps capable of bringing about our own species-wide destruction. The last mass extinction we engineer may very well be our own. He writes, "The fundamental risk was not that superintelligent machines might be actively hostile towards their human creators, or antecedents, but that they would be indifferent. Humans, after all, weren't actively hostile toward most of the species we'd made extinct over the millennia of our ascendence; they simply weren't part of our design." That is, we might be terrifyingly successful at making robots in our own image.

As a religious person who's big into death acceptance, I must admit that transhumanism is not for me. As O'Connell notes, transhumanists don't seem to value (or even recognize) certain ineffable, unquantifiable aspects of personhood. They argue that death acceptance is being "deathist" - trying to make peace with something that is ultimately awful. This flies in the face of a lot of what I care about: people are more than the sum of their parts. Creativity and beauty can be found in weakness and chaos. Death is not something to be feared, merely the next great adventure. And though he's not religious, I think O'Connell agrees with me: "If life had any meaning at all, my instinctive belief was that its meaning was animal, that it was inseparably bound up with birth, and reproduction, and death."

***

Bonus: Here's an excerpt from the book, as published by the author in the New York Times: "600 Miles in a Coffin-Shaped Bus, Campaigning Against Death Itself"

xo, 
Devo