2018, ISBN: 9780385540414

Gebundene Ausgabe

Pan Books. Good. 111 x 178 x 30mm. Paperback. 1998. 576 pages. <br>For thirty-year-old captain Scott McKay, the trans port run from Miami to Denver will give him the money he desper… Mehr…

Pan Books. Good. 111 x 178 x 30mm. Paperback. 1998. 576 pages. <br>For thirty-year-old captain Scott McKay, the trans port run from Miami to Denver will give him the money he desperat ely needs to keep his fledgling air cargo company flying. When a mysterious crate is discovered on his plane, however, McKay is or dered to abandon his present course and fly the crate and its own er, Vivian Henry, to Washington, D.C., before going to Denver. Mc Kay takes the forced detour in stride - until a strange noise com es from deep inside the crate. It is the voice of Vivian's husban d, Dr. Rogers Henry, warning that the shipment they are carrying is actually a fully armed Medusa device, a thermonuclear bomb tha t can destroy every computer chip over an entire continent, and b last the Silicon Age back to the Stone Age. And it is set to go o ff within hours. As panic spreads from the small community of n uclear scientists who used to work for Dr. Rogers Henry to the Wh ite House and eventually to the general public, a group of rogue military officers conspires to disobey the President's orders and secure the technology of the Medusa device, whatever the cost. W ill Captain McKay and his crew trust their own instincts to dispo se of the bomb, or will they let a misguided government dictate t heir actions? Editorial Reviews Review If you miss t he great airborne adventures of writers like the late Ernest K. G ann, John Nance might help take up some of the slack. His Pandora 's Clock--it became a TV movie--featured a nasty virus rampant at 35,000 feet. His latest has the widow of a world-class scientist trying to deliver to the Pentagon an invention that could shut d own computers everywhere, thus ending civilization (and online bo okselling) as we know it. Lots of hairy, if somewhat implausible, action--sure to be exploited in another TV movie. --This text re fers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Fr om School Library Journal YA?From the intriguing jacket cover to the final page, suspense abounds in this thrilling novel. When Sc ott McKay, captain of his private cargo plane, takes on two passe ngers and their cargo crates, he and his crew discover that they are in for the flight of their lives. While over Washington, DC, a strange noise comes from deep inside the crate owned by Vivian Henry. It is the voice of her husband, a nuclear scientist who wa s believed dead. The people onboard are informed that the shipmen t that they are carrying is a fully armed Medusa device, a thermo nuclear bomb that will not only kill millions of people, but can also destroy every computer chip on the continent, blasting the c ountry back into the Stone Age. It is set to go off within hours. Panic erupts in the world of nuclear scientists who used to work for Dr. Henry, for they realize that this threat is a real possi bility. Fear spreads through the White House and the general publ ic, as a group of rogue military officers conspire to secure the bomb at any cost. Captain McKay and his crew soon discover that t hey are being deceived, and that everyone's life is in danger. Mi strust, deceit, and spine-chilling action flow from every page of this story.?Anita Short, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From K irkus Reviews Retired airline and Air Force pilot Nance improves steadily, this time borrowing from his own plot for Pandora's Clo ck (1995) but leaving out the romance. Former Navy pilot Scott Mc Kay has started up his own airline for hauling air freight. Thing s are going well--until he discovers while in flight that a crate he's carrying holds an armed 20-megaton hydrogen bomb hitched to a deadly new device that will send out an electromagnetic shock wave. The wave's superpulse will turn every computer chip in the US into stone. Planes now aloft will be helpless, and the entire financial and banking system will collapse, bringing on worldwide chaos. All defense systems as well will destruct--and as many as a million people may die when the bomb goes off with the force o f a hundred Hiroshimas. McKay discovers this horror while circlin g Washington, D.C., awaiting landing instructions. Will D.C. be w iped out and uninhabitable for a thousand years? McKay has two cr ew members on board and two passengers. One is Vivian Henry, whos e late husband, a disgruntled defense physicist, created the bomb and sealed it into a steel case armed with sensors that will set it off should its case be tampered with. Simultaneously, the wor st hurricane in recorded history is chewing up the East Coast lik e a titanic lawnmower. The other passenger is Doctor Linda McCoy, a hugely intelligent meteorologist just back from Antarctica and riding herd on some secret instruments of her own in the hold. M eanwhile, the FBI, the Air Force, defense experts, and the Presid ent try to get McKay to land so that bomb experts can dismantle t he ticking bomb. McKay refuses- -the bomb is beyond dismantling-- and heads out to sea into the storm. Then things get worse . . . . Nothing new, maybe, but a thriller that grips and absolutely do esn't let go. (First printing of 100,000) -- Copyright ?1996, Kir kus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Library Journal Even from the grave, nuclear physicist Rogers Henry is d etermined to castigate the wife who left him and the nation that devalued his services. Two years after her ex-husband's death, Vi vian Henry agrees to accompany his lifelong project to the Pentag on. She doesn't know that what she is transporting is a thermonuc lear bomb that, upon detonation, will kill millions and immobiliz e U.S. computer, telecommunication, financial, and transportation systems. While airborne, the ex-navy pilot at the controls and t he hapless passengers discover the bomb when it diabolically info rms them that it will explode in three and a half hours. Nance (P andora's Clock, Doubleday, 1995) weaves a tight narrative and eff ectively builds the suspense. An old-fashioned page-turner recomm ended for public-library fiction collections. -?Maria A. Perez-St able, Western Michigan Univ. Libs., Kalamazoo Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist Nance's bes t-selling thriller, Pandora's Clock , which concerned an airline passenger afflicted with a deadly virus, recently aired as a tele vision miniseries. Nance, an experienced air-force and commercial pilot as well as a broadcast journalist (including serving as av iation consultant for ABC News), brings his aviation expertise on ce more to bear on another terrifying fictional work that could h ave been taken from today's headlines. For his livelihood, pilot and small businessman Scott McKay leases a converted Boeing 727 a nd ferries cargo across the country, much like a truck driver. On one particular flight, however, he comes to realize that his car go hold contains a thermonuclear bomb: a modern instrument of des truction dubbed the Medusa device and capable of an incredible ac t of terrorism--destroying every computer chip within a very wide radius. The effort to incapacitate the bomb before it can detona te is the warp and woof of an exciting plot that offers hours of pure diversion. Brad Hooper --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review So compelling it's tough to look away. --People magazine Master of aviation suspen se John J. Nance produces another high-flying thriller....BRILLIA NT...He moves the action effortlessly from place to place, buildi ng the tension and heightening the drama...NANCE DELIVERS PLENTY OF PUNCH. --The Orange County Register This book's more addictiv e than morphine, a proverbial page-turner. --Dallas Morning News --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of t his title. From the Publisher A new novel of airborne suspense b y the bestselling author of Pandora's Clock! Praise for John J. Nance's Books: Nance combines exquisite suspense and cardiac-arr est action to create the ultimate flying adventure. If you read t his on an airliner, you're a lot braver than I am. --Stephen Coon ts, author of Final Flight and The Minotaur Pandora's Clock will do for planes what the movie Speed did for buses. John Nance's r iveting thriller is a fast, fun read that never lets up. --Philli p Margolin, author of Gone, But Not Forgotten and The Burning Man Fasten your seat belts! John Nance turns air disaster into a gr ipping investigative novel. His professional skills as both pilot and writer combine to make Final Approach a compelling and all-t oo-realistic story. --James Michener --This text refers to an o ut of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Insid e Flap Everything in America is about to stop... 10,000 feet over Washington, D.C.! With the same breathtaking heroics that broug ht his bestselling Pandora's Clock international acclaim, John J. Nance once again spins today's headlines--this time about the th reat of nuclear terrorism--into an all-too-realistic story of hig h-flying suspense. For thirty-year-old captain Scott McKay, the transport run from Miami to Denver will give him the money he de sperately needs to keep his fledgling air cargo company flying. W hen a mysterious crate is discovered on his plane, however, McKay is ordered to abandon his present course and fly the crate and i ts owner, Vivian Henry, to Washington, D.C., before going to Denv er. McKay takes the forced detour in stride--until a strange nois e comes from deep inside the crate. It is the voice of Vivian's h usband, Dr. Rogers Henry, warning that the shipment they are carr ying is actually a fully armed Medusa device, a thermonuclear bom b that can destroy every computer chip over an entire continent, and blast the Silicon Age back to the Stone Age. And it is set to go off within hours. As panic spreads from the small community of nuclear scientists who used to work for Dr. Rogers Henry to t he White House and eventually to the general public, a group of r ogue military officers conspires to disobey the President's order s and secure the technology of the Medusa device, whatever the co st. Will Captain McKay and his crew trust their own instincts to dispose of the bomb, or will they let a misguided government dict ate their actions? Using his inside knowledge of the airline in dustry, as well as his expertise as a pilot, John J. Nance has on ce again turned our worst fears into a terrifyingly realistic sto ry. Medusa's Child will take readers into the center of a spine-t ingling crisis. --This text refers to an out of print or unavaila ble edition of this title. About the Author John J. Nance, aviat ion analyst for ABC News and a familiar face on Good Morning Amer ica, is the author of several bestselling novels including Fire F light, Skyhook, Turbulence, and Orbit. Two of his novels, Pandora 's Clock and Medusa's Child, have been made into highly successfu l television miniseries. A lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air For ce Reserve, Nance is a decorated pilot veteran of Vietnam and Ope rations Desert Storm/Desert Shield. He lives in Washington State. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. ? Reprinted by permission. All rights reser ved. IN FLIGHT--SCOTAIR 50--4:05 P.M. EDT The voice of the Washi ngton Approach controller was terse. ScotAir Fifty, I've been ha nded a telephone number in Miami you're to call immediately. Do y ou have a phone aboard? Scott felt off balance. He'd never heard an air traffic controller order a pilot to make an airborne call . He wished Doc was back in the cockpit. Scott punched the trans mit button. Ah, roger, ScotAir Fifty does have a telephone. Who's requesting the call? I don't know, ScotAir, the controller bega n, ...but you need to call this number immediately. I'm told it's an emergency. The controller relayed the number and Scott punch ed it into the Flitephone handset, his mind whirling through a va riety of apocalyptic possibilities as a man answered on the other end, listened to the name ScotAir, and identified himself as an FBI agent. Scott felt himself shudder within. We've been trying to find you, ScotAir. You were in Miami this morning at the same time some undocumented hazardous material was shipped out. We thi nk that material may be on board your aircraft. The memory of Li nda McCoy's pushiness in getting her two pallets aboard suddenly flooded Scott's mind, almost blocking the agent's words. They had n't really verified her identity, had they? They hadn't even insp ected her pallets, once he'd agreed to take them. We need you to land immediately, the agent said. The visual memory of Mrs. Hen ry's single pallet also crossed his mind. He knew even less about her. Scott realized the agent was still talking, and he wasn't paying attention. I'm sorry, say again. There was a pause in Mi ami. I said, we'll have the appropriate people ready to meet you to examine what you've got on board. You haven't unloaded anythin g since you left Miami, have you? Suddenly, for some reason, he felt guilty. All they'd done wrong was load someone else's pallet , and that was an innocent mistake. Yet the fact that an FBI agen t was asking him questions at all was vaguely terrifying. No, si r, Scott answered, It's all still aboard, but I need to know, are we in any danger, if what you're looking for is really here? Si lence. Sir? Did you hear me? He could hear the phone being shif ted from one hand to another in Miami, and at last the FBI agent' s voice returned. Ah, Captain, I doubt you're in any immediate da nger, but I can't say for certain. If the...items...we're looking for are on board your airplane, it depends on how well they're, ah, packaged. More links and connections raced through his head, none of them comforting. Miami...drug dealers...drug-making equ ipment...hazardous, carcinogenic chemicals...what if we're carryi ng illegal drugs... Scott heard his own voice as if it were dise mbodied. Okay. Where do you want us to land? We're waiting to get into National, but right now it's closed. There was a worrisome hesitation on the other end. Scott could hear voices before the agent spoke into the handset again. Okay, stay in your holding p attern. What phone are you on? Scott passed the number of the ai rcraft's Flitephone. Keep the li, Pan Books, 1998, 2.5, Doubleday. Very Good. 6.5 x 1 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2017. 256 pages. <br>This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians' pursuit of escaping mortality is a breez y 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 bett er than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley bill ionaires and some of the world's biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possi bilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost c ryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall dea th. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implant ing electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meet s a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mank ind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession wi th technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the techno logies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressi ng these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, o ften laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In inv estigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human. Editorial Reviews Revi ew **Winner of the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize** **Shortlisted for t he 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Nonfiction** **Finalist for the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize** Trou bling 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 belon gs 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 w ith extraordinary exuberance and wit... To Be a Machine is someti mes hilarious (triggering several bursts of uncontrollable giggle s while I read it on the Tube) but even as O'Connell mocks the mo re absurd manifestations of trans-humanism he shows sympathy and understanding for its adherents. --Financial Times Wryly humoro us, cogently insightful.... To Be a Machine is a lucid, soulful p ilgrimage into the heart of what humanity means to us now--and ho w science may redefine it tomorrow, for better and for worse. --N PR.org Open-minded... With a practiced journalist's sense of eng agement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, O'Connell des cribes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifter s, 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 wri ter of elegant precision and winning facetiousness... His ear and eye for detail are prodigious... O'Connell's writing--full of hi gh-low swerves and personal asides--is a constant reminder of the bathetic reality of being human. --4Columns [O'Connell] reveal s a bounty of beguiling ingenuity and genuine absurdity, elicitin g laughs and empathy, because we are our most human while trying to become something more than human. --Playboy O'Connell, a colu mnist for Slate, is a charming, funny tour guide. Writing on tran shumanism often gets swept away by the inherent drama of its adhe rents' promises, but O'Connell's eye for small human details...ke eps the narrative grounded in a way that rigorous scientific debu nking wouldn't. --Vice The game-changing technology being devel oped in Silicon Valley is often hard to wrap one's head around, a nd Mark O'Connell takes readers on a wild ride through this world in a way that makes one feel that anything is possible and every thing 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 hu mans to transcend the human condition. In an attempt to explore w hat it means to think of ourselves as machines, O'Connell takes r eaders on an all-encompassing tour...He writes in an agreeable, c onversational tone, offering his opinions, doubts, and fears alon g the way. --Undark O'Connell decides to dive into the transhuma nist culture in the best way possible: by traveling the world in search of key figures in the movement... The result is a fast-pac ed travel-log-cum-existential inquiry into the science and the re ligious significance of this age-old human desire to live forever : To become, in effect, a god. --NPR's 13.7 blog O'Connell, a j ournalist, makes his own prejudices clear: 'I am not now, nor hav e I ever been, a transhumanist,' he writes. However, this does no t stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement. --Science O'Connell's book is skeptical but not cynical, and it functions a s a witty overview of transhumanism. --The Ringer O'Connell's s ensibility--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 negotia ting today's tomorrow-land. --Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star Com edic, unsettling, ambivalent, and intriguing...O'Connell's book i s a worthwhile read for all audiences. --LitHub To Be a Machine is flat-out fascinating. O'Connell's journey is a layman's adven ture through the technological looking glass, an opportunity to m eet with a subculture existing on the fringes of the tech scene a nd a compelling peek at one possible future. Sharply-written and thought-provoking, To Be a Machine is a book that will undoubtedl y 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 stimula ting overview of modern scientific realities once thought to be t he exclusive purview of science fiction. --Publishers Weekly An enlightening tour of transhumanism... packed with eccentric chara cters...An unsettling but informative and sometimes-optimistic vi ew of mostly legitimate efforts at life extension. --Kirkus Revie ws Readers will appreciate O'Connell's sense of humor and his fa st-paced writing, and will at times feel like they're having a di alogue with the author as he ponders the ethics, consequences, an d dilemmas of these transhumanist activities embedded in society today. Those who are interested in artificial intelligence, bioen gineering, technology, and human development will find this book to be deeply engrossing and informative on the topic of transhuma nism and what it means to be a human today and in the future. --B ooklist A very lively book about transhumanism. --Sebastian Bar ry, The Guardian A voyage into the dark heart of transhumanism, where dwell many hopeful mind-uploaders, robo-warfighters, subder mal implanters, doomed immortalists, and sundry aging Singularita rians. A funny, wise, and oddly moving book. --Nicholson Baker, a uthor 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 o f 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, au thor of Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void O'Connell's forens ic investigation of the unnervingly fluid border between the huma n and the machine is elegant and gripping: at once a hilarious an thropological survey of the people who believe technology will gi ve 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 Provocat ive, funny and not a little gonzo, it's a great one to recommend to devotees of Jon Ronson --Bookseller (UK) Mark O'Connell, in f unny, reflective prose, finds in the transhumanists a desire to e xceed these very limits - of the capacity for thought, of death, of the body. --Globe and Mail (Canada) [A] beautifully written b ook... Ultimately, To Be A Machine is both an insight into transh umanist thought and O'Connell's very relatable fears and anxietie s 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 ofte n splendid writing, that makes him such a companionable guide. -- The Guardian (UK) By exposing the ludicrous yet terrifyingly ser ious ideologies behind transhumanism, To Be a Machine is an impor tant 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 t o be staggeringly funny. --New Scientist (UK) [A] Homer's Odyss ey for the digital age.... A gentle, humorous and lovingly writte n book. --The Times (UK) About the Author MARK O'CONNELL is Slat e's books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regula r 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. Excerpt. ® Repr inted by permission. All rights reserved. System Crash All stori es begin in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long a s we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about t he desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other t han the animals we are. In our oldest written narrative, we find the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who, distraught by the death of a fr iend 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 fo r mortality. Long story short: no dice. Later, we find Achilles' mother dipping him in the Styx in an effort to render him invulne rable. This, too, famously, does not pan out. See also: Daedalus , improvised wings. See also: Prometheus, stolen divine fire. W e exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendor. It w as not supposed to be this way: we weren't supposed to be weak, t o be ashamed, to suffer, to die. We have always had higher notion s of ourselves. The whole setup--garden, serpent, fruit, banishme nt--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 o f the story: the Christian story, the Western story. The point of which, on some level, is to explain ourselves to ourselves, to a ccount for why it's such a raw deal, this unnatural nature of our s. A man, wrote Emerson, is a god in ruins. Religion, more or l ess, arises out of this divine wreckage. And science, too--religi on's estranged half sibling--addresses itself to such animal diss atisfactions. In The Human Condition, writing in the wake of the Soviet launch of the first space satellite, Hannah Arendt reflect ed on the resulting sense of euphoria about escaping what one new s­paper 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 p lasm, to extend natural life spans far beyond their current limit s. This future man, she wrote, whom the scientists tell us they w ill produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possesse d by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to e xchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. A rebell ion against human existence as it has been given: this is as good a way as any of attempting to encapsulate what follows, to chara cterize what motivates the people I came to know in the writing o f 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 evolu tion of our species. It is their belief that we can and should er adicate aging as a cause of death; that we can and should use tec hnology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and shou ld 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 ou t? 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 ai ms, arises out of a basic sympathy with its premise: that human e xistence, as it has been given, is a suboptimal system. In an ab stract 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 visceral level. The first time I held him , three years ago now, I was overcome by a sense of the fragility of his little body--a body that had just emerged, howling and tr embling and darkly smeared with blood, out of the trembling body of his mother, from whom many hours of fanatical suffering and ex ertion had been required to deliver him into the world. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. I couldn't help but think that there ought to be a better system. I couldn't help but think that , at this late stage, we should be beyond all this. Here's a thi ng you should not do as a new father, as you perch uneasily on a leatherette maternity ward chair beside your sleeping infant and his sleeping mother: you should not read a newspaper. I did this, and I regretted it. I sat in the postnatal ward of the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, turning the pages of The Irish Time s in gradually mounting horror, browsing through a catalog of hum an perversity--of massacres and rapes, of cruelties casual and sy stemic: splintered, Doubleday, 2017, 3<

2018, ISBN: 9780385540414

Henry Holt and Co.. Very Good. 6.22 x 1.24 x 9.51 inches. Hardcover. 2014. 368 pages. <br>The untold story of the birth of the Predator dron e, a wonder weapon that transformed the … Mehr…

Henry Holt and Co.. Very Good. 6.22 x 1.24 x 9.51 inches. Hardcover. 2014. 368 pages. <br>The untold story of the birth of the Predator dron e, a wonder weapon that transformed the American military, reshap ed modern warfare, and sparked a revolution in aviation The crea tion of the first weapon in history whose operators can stalk and kill an enemy on the other side of the globe was far more than c lever engineering. As Richard Whittle shows in Predator, it was o ne of the most profound developments in the history of military a nd aerospace technology. Once considered fragile toys, drones we re long thought to be of limited utility. The Predator itself was resisted at nearly every turn by the military establishment, but a few iconoclasts refused to see this new technology smothered a t birth. The remarkable cast of characters responsible for develo ping the Predator includes a former Israeli inventor who turned h is Los Angeles garage into a drone laboratory, two billionaire br others marketing a futuristic weapon to help combat Communism, a pair of fighter pilots willing to buck their white-scarf fraterni ty, a cunning Pentagon operator nicknamed Snake, and a secretive Air Force organization known as Big Safari. When an Air Force tea m unleashed the first lethal drone strikes in 2001 for the CIA, t he military's view of drones changed nearly overnight. Based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews, Predator revea ls the dramatic inside story of the creation of a revolutionary w eapon that forever changed the way we wage war and opened the doo r to a new age in aviation. Editorial Reviews Review Fascinati ng...[Whittle] has combed every available document and talked to almost every American participant in drone research and developme nt. The result is a soup-to-nuts--or ground-to-air--history of th e world's most potent unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV. ?The Wall Street Journal Fresh and authoritative ... [Whittle] delivers ac tion-packed details about how the CIA and the Pentagon used armed Predators to hunt for al-Qaeda leaders immediately after 9/11. ? The Washington Post [A] superbly researched, clearly written boo k.... [Predator is] important because it is about a flying machin e ... with consequences so enormous as to nearly defy everyday la nguage.... Whittle is no unthinking patriot. He raises the questi ons that anybody who cares about the sacredness of human life oug ht to ask. ?The Dallas Morning News Superb... A lively, well-wri tten genesis story ... During five years of research and hundreds of interviews, Whittle unearthed a long list of revelations abou t the armed, remotely piloted aircraft.... And he adds scintillat ing details about its role in the hunt for top al-Qaeda leaders. ?San Diego Union-Tribune Predator ... tells a dramatic story whi le impressively detailing the long and often-threatened creation of the armed drone that would revolutionize modern warfare. ?Dail y News (New York) Read Predator for the fascinating story of how the unmanned aerial vehicle revolution came about. ?Foreign Poli cy Endlessly interesting and full of implication....There's plen ty of geekery befitting a Tom Clancy novel to keep readers entert ained... Whittle's account comes to a pointed conclusion: drone t echnology has already changed how we die, but what remains to be seen is how it 'may change the way people live.' ?Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Engrossing... [An] impressively researched, tho ught-provoking history. ?Publishers Weekly [The Predator's] hist ory is longer, and more surprising, than most readers probably re alize. Fascinating both as military history and as a look inside a hot contemporary social issue. ?Booklist Military and aviation aficionados will learn from and enjoy this in-depth work. ?Libra ry Journal A brilliant and detailed account of the growing pains of the weapons system of the future. Whittle fully captures the political struggle that almost downed the nascent Predator progra m. ?Richard A. Clarke, former National Security Council counter-t errorism director and author of Against All Enemies Richard Whit tle has delivered what will surely be the definitive history of h ow the United States came to arm its drones. Both deeply reported and very well written, Predator joins a very short list of books about the future of warfare that will engage any audience, from the specialist to the general reader. ?Peter Bergen, author of Ma nhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad Predator is a must-read. Love it or hate it, the armed drone rep resented a transformation??in military technology. Like every rev olution, this one had a colorful cast of characters, and Whittle tells their story with the insight and authority of a veteran mil itary journalist, drawing on inside sources in the Air Force, the CIA and defense industry. This book should be on the shelf of an yone who wants to understand military power in the 21st century. ?David Ignatius, columnist for The Washington Post and author of The Director All future attempts to understand the how and why o f the drone era's beginnings, and the crucial personalities, disa greements, and decisions that shaped this technology, will be bui lt on Richard Whittle's authoritative and original account. Preda tor tells the story of the real people whose insights, biases, an d experience changed the realities of modern warfare. ?James Fall ows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and author o f National Defense About the Author Richard Whittle is author o f The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osp rey. A Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and 2013-14 Ver ville Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum, Whittle has co vered the military for three decades, including twenty-two years as Pentagon correspondent for The Dallas Morning News. He lives i n Chevy Chase, Maryland. About the Author Richard Whittle is aut hor of The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-2 2 Osprey. A Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and 2013-1 4 Verville Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum, Whittle h as covered the military for three decades, including twenty-two y ears as Pentagon correspondent for The Dallas Morning News. He li ves in Chevy Chase, Maryland. ., Henry Holt and Co., 2014, 3, Doubleday. Very Good. 6.5 x 1 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2017. 256 pages. <br>This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians' pursuit of escaping mortality is a breez y 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 bett er than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley bill ionaires and some of the world's biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possi bilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost c ryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall dea th. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implant ing electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meet s a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mank ind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession wi th technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the techno logies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressi ng these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, o ften laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In inv estigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human. Editorial Reviews Revi ew **Winner of the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize** **Shortlisted for t he 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Nonfiction** **Finalist for the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize** Trou bling 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 belon gs 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 w ith extraordinary exuberance and wit... To Be a Machine is someti mes hilarious (triggering several bursts of uncontrollable giggle s while I read it on the Tube) but even as O'Connell mocks the mo re absurd manifestations of trans-humanism he shows sympathy and understanding for its adherents. --Financial Times Wryly humoro us, cogently insightful.... To Be a Machine is a lucid, soulful p ilgrimage into the heart of what humanity means to us now--and ho w science may redefine it tomorrow, for better and for worse. --N PR.org Open-minded... With a practiced journalist's sense of eng agement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, O'Connell des cribes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifter s, 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 wri ter of elegant precision and winning facetiousness... His ear and eye for detail are prodigious... O'Connell's writing--full of hi gh-low swerves and personal asides--is a constant reminder of the bathetic reality of being human. --4Columns [O'Connell] reveal s a bounty of beguiling ingenuity and genuine absurdity, elicitin g laughs and empathy, because we are our most human while trying to become something more than human. --Playboy O'Connell, a colu mnist for Slate, is a charming, funny tour guide. Writing on tran shumanism often gets swept away by the inherent drama of its adhe rents' promises, but O'Connell's eye for small human details...ke eps the narrative grounded in a way that rigorous scientific debu nking wouldn't. --Vice The game-changing technology being devel oped in Silicon Valley is often hard to wrap one's head around, a nd Mark O'Connell takes readers on a wild ride through this world in a way that makes one feel that anything is possible and every thing 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 hu mans to transcend the human condition. In an attempt to explore w hat it means to think of ourselves as machines, O'Connell takes r eaders on an all-encompassing tour...He writes in an agreeable, c onversational tone, offering his opinions, doubts, and fears alon g the way. --Undark O'Connell decides to dive into the transhuma nist culture in the best way possible: by traveling the world in search of key figures in the movement... The result is a fast-pac ed travel-log-cum-existential inquiry into the science and the re ligious significance of this age-old human desire to live forever : To become, in effect, a god. --NPR's 13.7 blog O'Connell, a j ournalist, makes his own prejudices clear: 'I am not now, nor hav e I ever been, a transhumanist,' he writes. However, this does no t stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement. --Science O'Connell's book is skeptical but not cynical, and it functions a s a witty overview of transhumanism. --The Ringer O'Connell's s ensibility--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 negotia ting today's tomorrow-land. --Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star Com edic, unsettling, ambivalent, and intriguing...O'Connell's book i s a worthwhile read for all audiences. --LitHub To Be a Machine is flat-out fascinating. O'Connell's journey is a layman's adven ture through the technological looking glass, an opportunity to m eet with a subculture existing on the fringes of the tech scene a nd a compelling peek at one possible future. Sharply-written and thought-provoking, To Be a Machine is a book that will undoubtedl y 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 stimula ting overview of modern scientific realities once thought to be t he exclusive purview of science fiction. --Publishers Weekly An enlightening tour of transhumanism... packed with eccentric chara cters...An unsettling but informative and sometimes-optimistic vi ew of mostly legitimate efforts at life extension. --Kirkus Revie ws Readers will appreciate O'Connell's sense of humor and his fa st-paced writing, and will at times feel like they're having a di alogue with the author as he ponders the ethics, consequences, an d dilemmas of these transhumanist activities embedded in society today. Those who are interested in artificial intelligence, bioen gineering, technology, and human development will find this book to be deeply engrossing and informative on the topic of transhuma nism and what it means to be a human today and in the future. --B ooklist A very lively book about transhumanism. --Sebastian Bar ry, The Guardian A voyage into the dark heart of transhumanism, where dwell many hopeful mind-uploaders, robo-warfighters, subder mal implanters, doomed immortalists, and sundry aging Singularita rians. A funny, wise, and oddly moving book. --Nicholson Baker, a uthor 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 o f 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, au thor of Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void O'Connell's forens ic investigation of the unnervingly fluid border between the huma n and the machine is elegant and gripping: at once a hilarious an thropological survey of the people who believe technology will gi ve 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 Provocat ive, funny and not a little gonzo, it's a great one to recommend to devotees of Jon Ronson --Bookseller (UK) Mark O'Connell, in f unny, reflective prose, finds in the transhumanists a desire to e xceed these very limits - of the capacity for thought, of death, of the body. --Globe and Mail (Canada) [A] beautifully written b ook... Ultimately, To Be A Machine is both an insight into transh umanist thought and O'Connell's very relatable fears and anxietie s 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 ofte n splendid writing, that makes him such a companionable guide. -- The Guardian (UK) By exposing the ludicrous yet terrifyingly ser ious ideologies behind transhumanism, To Be a Machine is an impor tant 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 t o be staggeringly funny. --New Scientist (UK) [A] Homer's Odyss ey for the digital age.... A gentle, humorous and lovingly writte n book. --The Times (UK) About the Author MARK O'CONNELL is Slat e's books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regula r 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. Excerpt. ® Repr inted by permission. All rights reserved. System Crash All stori es begin in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long a s we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about t he desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other t han the animals we are. In our oldest written narrative, we find the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who, distraught by the death of a fr iend 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 fo r mortality. Long story short: no dice. Later, we find Achilles' mother dipping him in the Styx in an effort to render him invulne rable. This, too, famously, does not pan out. See also: Daedalus , improvised wings. See also: Prometheus, stolen divine fire. W e exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendor. It w as not supposed to be this way: we weren't supposed to be weak, t o be ashamed, to suffer, to die. We have always had higher notion s of ourselves. The whole setup--garden, serpent, fruit, banishme nt--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 o f the story: the Christian story, the Western story. The point of which, on some level, is to explain ourselves to ourselves, to a ccount for why it's such a raw deal, this unnatural nature of our s. A man, wrote Emerson, is a god in ruins. Religion, more or l ess, arises out of this divine wreckage. And science, too--religi on's estranged half sibling--addresses itself to such animal diss atisfactions. In The Human Condition, writing in the wake of the Soviet launch of the first space satellite, Hannah Arendt reflect ed on the resulting sense of euphoria about escaping what one new s­paper 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 p lasm, to extend natural life spans far beyond their current limit s. This future man, she wrote, whom the scientists tell us they w ill produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possesse d by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to e xchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. A rebell ion against human existence as it has been given: this is as good a way as any of attempting to encapsulate what follows, to chara cterize what motivates the people I came to know in the writing o f 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 evolu tion of our species. It is their belief that we can and should er adicate aging as a cause of death; that we can and should use tec hnology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and shou ld 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 ou t? 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 ai ms, arises out of a basic sympathy with its premise: that human e xistence, as it has been given, is a suboptimal system. In an ab stract 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 visceral level. The first time I held him , three years ago now, I was overcome by a sense of the fragility of his little body--a body that had just emerged, howling and tr embling and darkly smeared with blood, out of the trembling body of his mother, from whom many hours of fanatical suffering and ex ertion had been required to deliver him into the world. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. I couldn't help but think that there ought to be a better system. I couldn't help but think that , at this late stage, we should be beyond all this. Here's a thi ng you should not do as a new father, as you perch uneasily on a leatherette maternity ward chair beside your sleeping infant and his sleeping mother: you should not read a newspaper. I did this, and I regretted it. I sat in the postnatal ward of the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, turning the pages of The Irish Time s in gradually mounting horror, browsing through a catalog of hum an perversity--of massacres and rapes, of cruelties casual and sy stemic: splintered, Doubleday, 2017, 3<

2018, ISBN: 9780385540414

Gebundene Ausgabe

NY: New York world's fair, 1964. Oversize paperback. VERY GOOD. Tight, bright, clean interior, faint age soil to exterior, slight curl. Staple bound. Exhibition at The Gallery at th… Mehr…

NY: New York world's fair, 1964. Oversize paperback. VERY GOOD. Tight, bright, clean interior, faint age soil to exterior, slight curl. Staple bound. Exhibition at The Gallery at the Better Living Center, May 22, 1964 through October 18, 1964, New York World's Fair 1964-1965 "An Exhibition Arranged by The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture". 6 page essay plus 45 full page prints, each with identification and commentary. 10-1/2x 8-3/8" (26.2 x21.1cm), New York world's fair, 1964, 3, New York : Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947., 1947. Poor. 315 p. 22 cm. ; LCCN: 47-30245 ; OCLC: 343876 ; Dark red cloth with gold lettering and embosse, in dramatic period brick red and grey dustjacket ; jacket has tears ; front hinge shaken ; "Tin Flute : A Bitter-Sweet Love Story. ; "This is a story of little people in Montreal's Saint-Henri, of poverty that destroyed the heart and soul, of brief encounter, opening doors to a better world. The time is shortly before the fall of France -- and with that fall imminent, a whipping into frenzy of nati onalist spirit- be it French or British- and the resultant enlistments, proving only too often an artificial escape from boredom, from unemployment, from pauperism. Against this unstable setting is told the story of Florentine, who worked at the Fiv e and Ten, and who thought that in Jean Levesque she had found escape from the tenement of her crowded home into the fire of that grand passion of movies and cheap novels. Florentine was different- but disillusionment, fear and a pathetic eagerness to put her home and family behind her, combine to break down the little prides she'd nourished.- And only at the end, when, having said goodbye to Emanuel who had saved her, she has another chance with Jean -- and turns aside -- she finds that once again her self esteem means more to her than the tawdry trimmings of passion. The writing is perceptive, vivid -- the story marches -- most of the characters live. " ; book club edition ; a reading copy only ; foxed ; POOR, New York : Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947., 1947, 1, Doubleday. Very Good. 6.5 x 1 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2017. 256 pages. <br>This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians' pursuit of escaping mortality is a breez y 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 bett er than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley bill ionaires and some of the world's biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possi bilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost c ryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall dea th. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implant ing electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meet s a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mank ind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession wi th technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the techno logies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressi ng these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, o ften laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In inv estigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human. Editorial Reviews Revi ew **Winner of the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize** **Shortlisted for t he 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Nonfiction** **Finalist for the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize** Trou bling 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 belon gs 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 w ith extraordinary exuberance and wit... To Be a Machine is someti mes hilarious (triggering several bursts of uncontrollable giggle s while I read it on the Tube) but even as O'Connell mocks the mo re absurd manifestations of trans-humanism he shows sympathy and understanding for its adherents. --Financial Times Wryly humoro us, cogently insightful.... To Be a Machine is a lucid, soulful p ilgrimage into the heart of what humanity means to us now--and ho w science may redefine it tomorrow, for better and for worse. --N PR.org Open-minded... With a practiced journalist's sense of eng agement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, O'Connell des cribes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifter s, 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 wri ter of elegant precision and winning facetiousness... His ear and eye for detail are prodigious... O'Connell's writing--full of hi gh-low swerves and personal asides--is a constant reminder of the bathetic reality of being human. --4Columns [O'Connell] reveal s a bounty of beguiling ingenuity and genuine absurdity, elicitin g laughs and empathy, because we are our most human while trying to become something more than human. --Playboy O'Connell, a colu mnist for Slate, is a charming, funny tour guide. Writing on tran shumanism often gets swept away by the inherent drama of its adhe rents' promises, but O'Connell's eye for small human details...ke eps the narrative grounded in a way that rigorous scientific debu nking wouldn't. --Vice The game-changing technology being devel oped in Silicon Valley is often hard to wrap one's head around, a nd Mark O'Connell takes readers on a wild ride through this world in a way that makes one feel that anything is possible and every thing 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 hu mans to transcend the human condition. In an attempt to explore w hat it means to think of ourselves as machines, O'Connell takes r eaders on an all-encompassing tour...He writes in an agreeable, c onversational tone, offering his opinions, doubts, and fears alon g the way. --Undark O'Connell decides to dive into the transhuma nist culture in the best way possible: by traveling the world in search of key figures in the movement... The result is a fast-pac ed travel-log-cum-existential inquiry into the science and the re ligious significance of this age-old human desire to live forever : To become, in effect, a god. --NPR's 13.7 blog O'Connell, a j ournalist, makes his own prejudices clear: 'I am not now, nor hav e I ever been, a transhumanist,' he writes. However, this does no t stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement. --Science O'Connell's book is skeptical but not cynical, and it functions a s a witty overview of transhumanism. --The Ringer O'Connell's s ensibility--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 negotia ting today's tomorrow-land. --Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star Com edic, unsettling, ambivalent, and intriguing...O'Connell's book i s a worthwhile read for all audiences. --LitHub To Be a Machine is flat-out fascinating. O'Connell's journey is a layman's adven ture through the technological looking glass, an opportunity to m eet with a subculture existing on the fringes of the tech scene a nd a compelling peek at one possible future. Sharply-written and thought-provoking, To Be a Machine is a book that will undoubtedl y 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 stimula ting overview of modern scientific realities once thought to be t he exclusive purview of science fiction. --Publishers Weekly An enlightening tour of transhumanism... packed with eccentric chara cters...An unsettling but informative and sometimes-optimistic vi ew of mostly legitimate efforts at life extension. --Kirkus Revie ws Readers will appreciate O'Connell's sense of humor and his fa st-paced writing, and will at times feel like they're having a di alogue with the author as he ponders the ethics, consequences, an d dilemmas of these transhumanist activities embedded in society today. Those who are interested in artificial intelligence, bioen gineering, technology, and human development will find this book to be deeply engrossing and informative on the topic of transhuma nism and what it means to be a human today and in the future. --B ooklist A very lively book about transhumanism. --Sebastian Bar ry, The Guardian A voyage into the dark heart of transhumanism, where dwell many hopeful mind-uploaders, robo-warfighters, subder mal implanters, doomed immortalists, and sundry aging Singularita rians. A funny, wise, and oddly moving book. --Nicholson Baker, a uthor 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 o f 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, au thor of Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void O'Connell's forens ic investigation of the unnervingly fluid border between the huma n and the machine is elegant and gripping: at once a hilarious an thropological survey of the people who believe technology will gi ve 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 Provocat ive, funny and not a little gonzo, it's a great one to recommend to devotees of Jon Ronson --Bookseller (UK) Mark O'Connell, in f unny, reflective prose, finds in the transhumanists a desire to e xceed these very limits - of the capacity for thought, of death, of the body. --Globe and Mail (Canada) [A] beautifully written b ook... Ultimately, To Be A Machine is both an insight into transh umanist thought and O'Connell's very relatable fears and anxietie s 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 ofte n splendid writing, that makes him such a companionable guide. -- The Guardian (UK) By exposing the ludicrous yet terrifyingly ser ious ideologies behind transhumanism, To Be a Machine is an impor tant 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 t o be staggeringly funny. --New Scientist (UK) [A] Homer's Odyss ey for the digital age.... A gentle, humorous and lovingly writte n book. --The Times (UK) About the Author MARK O'CONNELL is Slat e's books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regula r 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. Excerpt. ® Repr inted by permission. All rights reserved. System Crash All stori es begin in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long a s we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about t he desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other t han the animals we are. In our oldest written narrative, we find the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who, distraught by the death of a fr iend 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 fo r mortality. Long story short: no dice. Later, we find Achilles' mother dipping him in the Styx in an effort to render him invulne rable. This, too, famously, does not pan out. See also: Daedalus , improvised wings. See also: Prometheus, stolen divine fire. W e exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendor. It w as not supposed to be this way: we weren't supposed to be weak, t o be ashamed, to suffer, to die. We have always had higher notion s of ourselves. The whole setup--garden, serpent, fruit, banishme nt--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 o f the story: the Christian story, the Western story. The point of which, on some level, is to explain ourselves to ourselves, to a ccount for why it's such a raw deal, this unnatural nature of our s. A man, wrote Emerson, is a god in ruins. Religion, more or l ess, arises out of this divine wreckage. And science, too--religi on's estranged half sibling--addresses itself to such animal diss atisfactions. In The Human Condition, writing in the wake of the Soviet launch of the first space satellite, Hannah Arendt reflect ed on the resulting sense of euphoria about escaping what one new s­paper 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 p lasm, to extend natural life spans far beyond their current limit s. This future man, she wrote, whom the scientists tell us they w ill produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possesse d by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to e xchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. A rebell ion against human existence as it has been given: this is as good a way as any of attempting to encapsulate what follows, to chara cterize what motivates the people I came to know in the writing o f 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 evolu tion of our species. It is their belief that we can and should er adicate aging as a cause of death; that we can and should use tec hnology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and shou ld 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 ou t? 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 ai ms, arises out of a basic sympathy with its premise: that human e xistence, as it has been given, is a suboptimal system. In an ab stract 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 visceral level. The first time I held him , three years ago now, I was overcome by a sense of the fragility of his little body--a body that had just emerged, howling and tr embling and darkly smeared with blood, out of the trembling body of his mother, from whom many hours of fanatical suffering and ex ertion had been required to deliver him into the world. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. I couldn't help but think that there ought to be a better system. I couldn't help but think that , at this late stage, we should be beyond all this. Here's a thi ng you should not do as a new father, as you perch uneasily on a leatherette maternity ward chair beside your sleeping infant and his sleeping mother: you should not read a newspaper. I did this, and I regretted it. I sat in the postnatal ward of the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, turning the pages of The Irish Time s in gradually mounting horror, browsing through a catalog of hum an perversity--of massacres and rapes, of cruelties casual and sy stemic: splintered, Doubleday, 2017, 3<

2018, ISBN: 9780385540414

Gebundene Ausgabe

New York United States: Riverhead Books. Near Fine. 2018. 1st Paperback Edition. Card Cover. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" Tall Octavo 0525538984 Soft Cover Softcover … Mehr…

New York United States: Riverhead Books. Near Fine. 2018. 1st Paperback Edition. Card Cover. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" Tall Octavo 0525538984 Soft Cover Softcover 9780525538981Boy Erased (Movie Tie-In): A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family. The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Through an institutionalized Twelve-Step Program heavy on Bible study, he was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay, cleansed of impure urges and stronger in his faith in God for his brush with sin. Instead, even when faced with a harrowing and brutal journey, Garrard found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness. ., Riverhead Books, 2018, 4, London: Century, 1995. Book in as new condition with very slight browning to page edges. Dust jacket not price clipped or marked or torn with minor creasing to upper front edge. 182pp. The remarkable true story of a modern day quest for the Holy Grail in Britain.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Fine/Near Fine. 9.5 x 6.25 inches., Century, 1995, 4.5, Doubleday. Very Good. 6.5 x 1 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2017. 256 pages. <br>This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians' pursuit of escaping mortality is a breez y 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 bett er than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley bill ionaires and some of the world's biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possi bilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost c ryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall dea th. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implant ing electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meet s a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mank ind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession wi th technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the techno logies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressi ng these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, o ften laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In inv estigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human. Editorial Reviews Revi ew **Winner of the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize** **Shortlisted for t he 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Nonfiction** **Finalist for the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize** Trou bling 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 belon gs 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 w ith extraordinary exuberance and wit... To Be a Machine is someti mes hilarious (triggering several bursts of uncontrollable giggle s while I read it on the Tube) but even as O'Connell mocks the mo re absurd manifestations of trans-humanism he shows sympathy and understanding for its adherents. --Financial Times Wryly humoro us, cogently insightful.... To Be a Machine is a lucid, soulful p ilgrimage into the heart of what humanity means to us now--and ho w science may redefine it tomorrow, for better and for worse. --N PR.org Open-minded... With a practiced journalist's sense of eng agement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, O'Connell des cribes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifter s, 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 wri ter of elegant precision and winning facetiousness... His ear and eye for detail are prodigious... O'Connell's writing--full of hi gh-low swerves and personal asides--is a constant reminder of the bathetic reality of being human. --4Columns [O'Connell] reveal s a bounty of beguiling ingenuity and genuine absurdity, elicitin g laughs and empathy, because we are our most human while trying to become something more than human. --Playboy O'Connell, a colu mnist for Slate, is a charming, funny tour guide. Writing on tran shumanism often gets swept away by the inherent drama of its adhe rents' promises, but O'Connell's eye for small human details...ke eps the narrative grounded in a way that rigorous scientific debu nking wouldn't. --Vice The game-changing technology being devel oped in Silicon Valley is often hard to wrap one's head around, a nd Mark O'Connell takes readers on a wild ride through this world in a way that makes one feel that anything is possible and every thing 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 hu mans to transcend the human condition. In an attempt to explore w hat it means to think of ourselves as machines, O'Connell takes r eaders on an all-encompassing tour...He writes in an agreeable, c onversational tone, offering his opinions, doubts, and fears alon g the way. --Undark O'Connell decides to dive into the transhuma nist culture in the best way possible: by traveling the world in search of key figures in the movement... The result is a fast-pac ed travel-log-cum-existential inquiry into the science and the re ligious significance of this age-old human desire to live forever : To become, in effect, a god. --NPR's 13.7 blog O'Connell, a j ournalist, makes his own prejudices clear: 'I am not now, nor hav e I ever been, a transhumanist,' he writes. However, this does no t stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement. --Science O'Connell's book is skeptical but not cynical, and it functions a s a witty overview of transhumanism. --The Ringer O'Connell's s ensibility--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 negotia ting today's tomorrow-land. --Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star Com edic, unsettling, ambivalent, and intriguing...O'Connell's book i s a worthwhile read for all audiences. --LitHub To Be a Machine is flat-out fascinating. O'Connell's journey is a layman's adven ture through the technological looking glass, an opportunity to m eet with a subculture existing on the fringes of the tech scene a nd a compelling peek at one possible future. Sharply-written and thought-provoking, To Be a Machine is a book that will undoubtedl y 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 stimula ting overview of modern scientific realities once thought to be t he exclusive purview of science fiction. --Publishers Weekly An enlightening tour of transhumanism... packed with eccentric chara cters...An unsettling but informative and sometimes-optimistic vi ew of mostly legitimate efforts at life extension. --Kirkus Revie ws Readers will appreciate O'Connell's sense of humor and his fa st-paced writing, and will at times feel like they're having a di alogue with the author as he ponders the ethics, consequences, an d dilemmas of these transhumanist activities embedded in society today. Those who are interested in artificial intelligence, bioen gineering, technology, and human development will find this book to be deeply engrossing and informative on the topic of transhuma nism and what it means to be a human today and in the future. --B ooklist A very lively book about transhumanism. --Sebastian Bar ry, The Guardian A voyage into the dark heart of transhumanism, where dwell many hopeful mind-uploaders, robo-warfighters, subder mal implanters, doomed immortalists, and sundry aging Singularita rians. A funny, wise, and oddly moving book. --Nicholson Baker, a uthor 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 o f 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, au thor of Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void O'Connell's forens ic investigation of the unnervingly fluid border between the huma n and the machine is elegant and gripping: at once a hilarious an thropological survey of the people who believe technology will gi ve 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 Provocat ive, funny and not a little gonzo, it's a great one to recommend to devotees of Jon Ronson --Bookseller (UK) Mark O'Connell, in f unny, reflective prose, finds in the transhumanists a desire to e xceed these very limits - of the capacity for thought, of death, of the body. --Globe and Mail (Canada) [A] beautifully written b ook... Ultimately, To Be A Machine is both an insight into transh umanist thought and O'Connell's very relatable fears and anxietie s 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 ofte n splendid writing, that makes him such a companionable guide. -- The Guardian (UK) By exposing the ludicrous yet terrifyingly ser ious ideologies behind transhumanism, To Be a Machine is an impor tant 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 t o be staggeringly funny. --New Scientist (UK) [A] Homer's Odyss ey for the digital age.... A gentle, humorous and lovingly writte n book. --The Times (UK) About the Author MARK O'CONNELL is Slat e's books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regula r 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. Excerpt. ® Repr inted by permission. All rights reserved. System Crash All stori es begin in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long a s we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about t he desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other t han the animals we are. In our oldest written narrative, we find the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who, distraught by the death of a fr iend 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 fo r mortality. Long story short: no dice. Later, we find Achilles' mother dipping him in the Styx in an effort to render him invulne rable. This, too, famously, does not pan out. See also: Daedalus , improvised wings. See also: Prometheus, stolen divine fire. W e exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendor. It w as not supposed to be this way: we weren't supposed to be weak, t o be ashamed, to suffer, to die. We have always had higher notion s of ourselves. The whole setup--garden, serpent, fruit, banishme nt--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 o f the story: the Christian story, the Western story. The point of which, on some level, is to explain ourselves to ourselves, to a ccount for why it's such a raw deal, this unnatural nature of our s. A man, wrote Emerson, is a god in ruins. Religion, more or l ess, arises out of this divine wreckage. And science, too--religi on's estranged half sibling--addresses itself to such animal diss atisfactions. In The Human Condition, writing in the wake of the Soviet launch of the first space satellite, Hannah Arendt reflect ed on the resulting sense of euphoria about escaping what one new s­paper 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 p lasm, to extend natural life spans far beyond their current limit s. This future man, she wrote, whom the scientists tell us they w ill produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possesse d by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to e xchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. A rebell ion against human existence as it has been given: this is as good a way as any of attempting to encapsulate what follows, to chara cterize what motivates the people I came to know in the writing o f 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 evolu tion of our species. It is their belief that we can and should er adicate aging as a cause of death; that we can and should use tec hnology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and shou ld 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 ou t? 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 ai ms, arises out of a basic sympathy with its premise: that human e xistence, as it has been given, is a suboptimal system. In an ab stract 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 visceral level. The first time I held him , three years ago now, I was overcome by a sense of the fragility of his little body--a body that had just emerged, howling and tr embling and darkly smeared with blood, out of the trembling body of his mother, from whom many hours of fanatical suffering and ex ertion had been required to deliver him into the world. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. I couldn't help but think that there ought to be a better system. I couldn't help but think that , at this late stage, we should be beyond all this. Here's a thi ng you should not do as a new father, as you perch uneasily on a leatherette maternity ward chair beside your sleeping infant and his sleeping mother: you should not read a newspaper. I did this, and I regretted it. I sat in the postnatal ward of the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, turning the pages of The Irish Time s in gradually mounting horror, browsing through a catalog of hum an perversity--of massacres and rapes, of cruelties casual and sy stemic: splintered, Doubleday, 2017, 3<

2018, ISBN: 9780385540414

VHS Tape. VHS. Very Good. Disney's An Extremely Goofy Movie [VHS] 2000, Clean, Checked and Tested, light wear to the illustrated case. Goofy's second feature opens with the big dog wist… Mehr…

VHS Tape. VHS. Very Good. Disney's An Extremely Goofy Movie [VHS] 2000, Clean, Checked and Tested, light wear to the illustrated case. Goofy's second feature opens with the big dog wistfully sending his teenage son Max off to his freshman year of college. In short order, daydreaming Dad is fired and learns he's not employable without finishing his degree at--you guessed it--the same university his beloved "Maxie" attends. Soon the eager father is embarrassing the heck out of his son and curbing his independence. At the same time, Max and his skateboarding buddies form an extreme sports team, challenging the snooty fraternity team captained by Bradley Uppercrust III, who doesn't grasp the concept of fair play. When things get rough, Goofy saves the day--and finds true love with a librarian who shares his ways. The 73-minute story is engaging and the moral commendable (integrity wins in the end). Ages 3 and up will enjoy the antics..., WALT DISNEY ANIMATION, 2000, 3, Doubleday. Very Good. 6.5 x 1 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2017. 256 pages. <br>This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians' pursuit of escaping mortality is a breez y 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 bett er than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley bill ionaires and some of the world's biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possi bilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost c ryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall dea th. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implant ing electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meet s a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mank ind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession wi th technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the techno logies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressi ng these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, o ften laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In inv estigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human. Editorial Reviews Revi ew **Winner of the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize** **Shortlisted for t he 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Nonfiction** **Finalist for the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize** Trou bling 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 belon gs 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 w ith extraordinary exuberance and wit... To Be a Machine is someti mes hilarious (triggering several bursts of uncontrollable giggle s while I read it on the Tube) but even as O'Connell mocks the mo re absurd manifestations of trans-humanism he shows sympathy and understanding for its adherents. --Financial Times Wryly humoro us, cogently insightful.... To Be a Machine is a lucid, soulful p ilgrimage into the heart of what humanity means to us now--and ho w science may redefine it tomorrow, for better and for worse. --N PR.org Open-minded... With a practiced journalist's sense of eng agement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, O'Connell des cribes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifter s, 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 wri ter of elegant precision and winning facetiousness... His ear and eye for detail are prodigious... O'Connell's writing--full of hi gh-low swerves and personal asides--is a constant reminder of the bathetic reality of being human. --4Columns [O'Connell] reveal s a bounty of beguiling ingenuity and genuine absurdity, elicitin g laughs and empathy, because we are our most human while trying to become something more than human. --Playboy O'Connell, a colu mnist for Slate, is a charming, funny tour guide. Writing on tran shumanism often gets swept away by the inherent drama of its adhe rents' promises, but O'Connell's eye for small human details...ke eps the narrative grounded in a way that rigorous scientific debu nking wouldn't. --Vice The game-changing technology being devel oped in Silicon Valley is often hard to wrap one's head around, a nd Mark O'Connell takes readers on a wild ride through this world in a way that makes one feel that anything is possible and every thing 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 hu mans to transcend the human condition. In an attempt to explore w hat it means to think of ourselves as machines, O'Connell takes r eaders on an all-encompassing tour...He writes in an agreeable, c onversational tone, offering his opinions, doubts, and fears alon g the way. --Undark O'Connell decides to dive into the transhuma nist culture in the best way possible: by traveling the world in search of key figures in the movement... The result is a fast-pac ed travel-log-cum-existential inquiry into the science and the re ligious significance of this age-old human desire to live forever : To become, in effect, a god. --NPR's 13.7 blog O'Connell, a j ournalist, makes his own prejudices clear: 'I am not now, nor hav e I ever been, a transhumanist,' he writes. However, this does no t stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement. --Science O'Connell's book is skeptical but not cynical, and it functions a s a witty overview of transhumanism. --The Ringer O'Connell's s ensibility--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 negotia ting today's tomorrow-land. --Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star Com edic, unsettling, ambivalent, and intriguing...O'Connell's book i s a worthwhile read for all audiences. --LitHub To Be a Machine is flat-out fascinating. O'Connell's journey is a layman's adven ture through the technological looking glass, an opportunity to m eet with a subculture existing on the fringes of the tech scene a nd a compelling peek at one possible future. Sharply-written and thought-provoking, To Be a Machine is a book that will undoubtedl y 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 stimula ting overview of modern scientific realities once thought to be t he exclusive purview of science fiction. --Publishers Weekly An enlightening tour of transhumanism... packed with eccentric chara cters...An unsettling but informative and sometimes-optimistic vi ew of mostly legitimate efforts at life extension. --Kirkus Revie ws Readers will appreciate O'Connell's sense of humor and his fa st-paced writing, and will at times feel like they're having a di alogue with the author as he ponders the ethics, consequences, an d dilemmas of these transhumanist activities embedded in society today. Those who are interested in artificial intelligence, bioen gineering, technology, and human development will find this book to be deeply engrossing and informative on the topic of transhuma nism and what it means to be a human today and in the future. --B ooklist A very lively book about transhumanism. --Sebastian Bar ry, The Guardian A voyage into the dark heart of transhumanism, where dwell many hopeful mind-uploaders, robo-warfighters, subder mal implanters, doomed immortalists, and sundry aging Singularita rians. A funny, wise, and oddly moving book. --Nicholson Baker, a uthor 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 o f 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, au thor of Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void O'Connell's forens ic investigation of the unnervingly fluid border between the huma n and the machine is elegant and gripping: at once a hilarious an thropological survey of the people who believe technology will gi ve 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 Provocat ive, funny and not a little gonzo, it's a great one to recommend to devotees of Jon Ronson --Bookseller (UK) Mark O'Connell, in f unny, reflective prose, finds in the transhumanists a desire to e xceed these very limits - of the capacity for thought, of death, of the body. --Globe and Mail (Canada) [A] beautifully written b ook... Ultimately, To Be A Machine is both an insight into transh umanist thought and O'Connell's very relatable fears and anxietie s 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 ofte n splendid writing, that makes him such a companionable guide. -- The Guardian (UK) By exposing the ludicrous yet terrifyingly ser ious ideologies behind transhumanism, To Be a Machine is an impor tant 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 t o be staggeringly funny. --New Scientist (UK) [A] Homer's Odyss ey for the digital age.... A gentle, humorous and lovingly writte n book. --The Times (UK) About the Author MARK O'CONNELL is Slat e's books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regula r 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. Excerpt. ® Repr inted by permission. All rights reserved. System Crash All stori es begin in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long a s we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about t he desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other t han the animals we are. In our oldest written narrative, we find the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who, distraught by the death of a fr iend 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 fo r mortality. Long story short: no dice. Later, we find Achilles' mother dipping him in the Styx in an effort to render him invulne rable. This, too, famously, does not pan out. See also: Daedalus , improvised wings. See also: Prometheus, stolen divine fire. W e exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendor. It w as not supposed to be this way: we weren't supposed to be weak, t o be ashamed, to suffer, to die. We have always had higher notion s of ourselves. The whole setup--garden, serpent, fruit, banishme nt--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 o f the story: the Christian story, the Western story. The point of which, on some level, is to explain ourselves to ourselves, to a ccount for why it's such a raw deal, this unnatural nature of our s. A man, wrote Emerson, is a god in ruins. Religion, more or l ess, arises out of this divine wreckage. And science, too--religi on's estranged half sibling--addresses itself to such animal diss atisfactions. In The Human Condition, writing in the wake of the Soviet launch of the first space satellite, Hannah Arendt reflect ed on the resulting sense of euphoria about escaping what one new s­paper 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 p lasm, to extend natural life spans far beyond their current limit s. This future man, she wrote, whom the scientists tell us they w ill produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possesse d by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to e xchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. A rebell ion against human existence as it has been given: this is as good a way as any of attempting to encapsulate what follows, to chara cterize what motivates the people I came to know in the writing o f 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 evolu tion of our species. It is their belief that we can and should er adicate aging as a cause of death; that we can and should use tec hnology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and shou ld 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 ou t? 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 ai ms, arises out of a basic sympathy with its premise: that human e xistence, as it has been given, is a suboptimal system. In an ab stract 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 visceral level. The first time I held him , three years ago now, I was overcome by a sense of the fragility of his little body--a body that had just emerged, howling and tr embling and darkly smeared with blood, out of the trembling body of his mother, from whom many hours of fanatical suffering and ex ertion had been required to deliver him into the world. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. I couldn't help but think that there ought to be a better system. I couldn't help but think that , at this late stage, we should be beyond all this. Here's a thi ng you should not do as a new father, as you perch uneasily on a leatherette maternity ward chair beside your sleeping infant and his sleeping mother: you should not read a newspaper. I did this, and I regretted it. I sat in the postnatal ward of the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, turning the pages of The Irish Time s in gradually mounting horror, browsing through a catalog of hum an perversity--of massacres and rapes, of cruelties casual and sy stemic: splintered, Doubleday, 2017, 3<