2018, ISBN: 9783842481060

Gebundene Ausgabe

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 mort… Mehr…

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, Parabola Books, 2004. 228pp Soft covers. Fine. This collection of essays by Anatole Broyard, Joseph Bruchac, Norman Cousins, John Donne, Kat Duff, Maya Deren, Thich Nhat Hanh, Helen M. Luke, and others draws from many disciplines and points of view to offer a powerful perspective on health and healing, disability and disease, doctors and doctoring, Eastern and Western medical theories and treatments, and the final step in the healing process - consciously confronting the inevitability of death. Patients with cancer, AIDS, alcoholism, chronic fatigue syndrome, paralysis, and other debilitative and chronic diseases give their personal accounts of facing and, in some cases, conquering illness. More than mere inspirational anecdotes, these are thought-provoking explorations of a difficult subject that encourage a re-examination of views on sickness, health, and the path between them, Parabola Books, 2004, 0, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884. First Edition. Fair. 16mo, 319 pages, olive green cloth, lacks the frontispiece, edgeworn This is the first and only novel by Lincoln's private secretary who later became U. S. Secretary of State. This novel is a reaction to the labor agitation of the 1870s and 1880s. This work reflects the viewpoint of the wealthy class in opposition to the laboring class. This was published anonymously - which provoked a heightened interest in it. Critic Virgil I. Parrington judged this novel as the "first girding of the loins of polite letters to put down the menace that looked out from the underworld of the proletariat." This book edition is slightly changed from its magazine appearance in Century Magazine. Others wrote novels immediately in reaction to this work, leaving this as "perhaps the best-known anti-labor novel in the American literary tradition." - Scott Dalrymple., Harper & Brothers, 1884, 2<

ISBN: 9783842481060

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884. First Edition. Fair. 16mo, 319 pages, olive green cloth, lacks the frontispiece, edgeworn This is the first and only novel by Lincoln's private secret… Mehr…

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884. First Edition. Fair. 16mo, 319 pages, olive green cloth, lacks the frontispiece, edgeworn This is the first and only novel by Lincoln's private secretary who later became U. S. Secretary of State. This novel is a reaction to the labor agitation of the 1870s and 1880s. This work reflects the viewpoint of the wealthy class in opposition to the laboring class. This was published anonymously - which provoked a heightened interest in it. Critic Virgil I. Parrington judged this novel as the "first girding of the loins of polite letters to put down the menace that looked out from the underworld of the proletariat." This book edition is slightly changed from its magazine appearance in Century Magazine. Others wrote novels immediately in reaction to this work, leaving this as "perhaps the best-known anti-labor novel in the American literary tradition." - Scott Dalrymple., Harper & Brothers, 1884, 2<