To Be a Machine or how to solve the modest problem of death

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, an essential book about our future, by Mark O’Connell

 

Black Mirror ended its fourth season with an episode called Metalhead in which robodogs turned on humans; revealing the quest for survival in a society in which robots could outsmart us. At first, I thought that was alarming but typically what you would expect from an episode of Black Mirror. But I didn’t expect to find these robodogs becoming real a month after having watched the episode. Indeed, Boston Dynamics whose aim is to ‘build machines that both break boundaries and work in the real world’ just launched similar robots as the ones in Black Mirror; something that personally gave me shivers up and down my spine. The next morning, while I was listening to the radio, I was informed that sex-robots taking the shape of a female human body were available in a brothel in France. Thinking about it, all in all, I became sceptical about our world’s future and decided to make some researches. Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine turned out to be the answer to many of my questions and fears.

If O’Connell’s book had been given to our world ten years earlier, we would have described it as science-fiction. Its characters’ thoughts on existence would have seemed over-exaggerated and the readers would have laughed at them. But as a contemporary reader, I didn’t think it was amusing and I was on the lookout. O’Connell brings us with him on an investigation within the ‘transhumanist’ community whose movement’s belief is that technology should be used to extend human life and eventually achieve immortality.

During the whole book, we are introduced to the transhumanist movement through the vision of different people, some of them already known and powerful due to their notoriety in the tech field such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, or Ray Kurzweil. However, O’Connell goes further and his quest takes us to individuals like Max More, founder of the world’s foremost cryonics company, who freezes the heads of deceased clients believing that one day, they’ll be able to relive. Through the study, many projects coming from transhumanists are given to portray the movement and they are just as scary from one to another: from humans wearing an ‘ear on arm’ allowing to ‘connect to the Internet so that it could be employed as a remote listening device for people in distant locations’ to a chip put in brains through surgery which could allow to ‘upload your minds’ and reunite knowledge on a computer. On another hand, O’Connell also exposes ideas that have been already set up such as a Tim Cannon’s computer programmer called ‘body temperature’ implanted in his arm as a device the size of a pack of cards using no medical aid. Its purpose is to send the data to an Android device via Bluetooth, and make a record of any changes in temperature (being too curious I looked at it on the internet and I don’t recommend it). Creepily, these ideas are a few of the many that you can read in O’Connell’s book. Like the author says; ‘this is the problem with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction’.

To Be a Machine is written with lightness through a narrative that enables the reader to create interest in a field that most of the readers will be clueless about. Even if the book has a lot of information to share, it never feels overstuffed. In order to create that addictive reading (from my opinion), O’Connell inserts personal anecdotes about his family or his personal thoughts on the movement which makes the book easy to read since it feels like a novel rather than a study case, investigation or scientific documentary. Furthermore, O’Connell’s literary background as a journalist, author, and literary critic helps any reader with taste for literature to relate to his story. Indeed, the author uses intertextuality starting with mythology such as Daedalus, Prometheus or Achille and following with references to Dostoevsky, Hamlet or Nietzsche. Moreover, his writing at times makes us realise his academic background as his observations are given depth through references to Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer or more subject-targeted writers such as Donna Haraway and her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’.

To Be a Machine is mainly a book questioning the readers on their personal purpose on earth, their actions and their way of thinking. O’Connell brings us back to the state of animals: ‘Perhaps the reason for our being is precisely our inability to accept ourselves as animals, to accept the fact that we will die animal deaths’. The author takes our attention by creating a particular form of pathos by exposing our feeling of vulnerability and insignificance as humans: ‘As long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about the desire to escape our human bodies, to become something else than the animals we are’. He reminds us that we are ’65 percent oxygen- which is mostly air, mostly nothing’. These recurrent statements make us want to believe in the reducing of the ageing process or any other ideas created by the transhumanists in order to feel superior; in these ideas we find hope to overcome our vulnerability as humans.

However, O’Connell does not seem to follow the transhumanists’ ideas. For him, the movement is more of a religion, a way to overcome the fear of death. To prove it, he wrote a whole chapter about it by bringing us in the intimacy of a spiritual group called Terasem; ‘a collective consciousness dedicated to diversity, unity and joyful immortality’ according to their booklet. They believe that death is solvable and relate on Aubrey de Grey’s idea (one of the transhumanists) that: ‘aging is a disease, and furthermore a curable one and that it should be approached as such’. In this sense, even if not all transhumanists belong to that spiritual group, according to O’Connell; they all follow the same ideology in their research for improvement of the human existence.

The answers to my primary fear were given when I heard of the concept of ‘singularity’ which is a point when technological intelligence will become so forward-thinking that civilization will essentially be outdated. O’Connell leaves us at the end of the novel with negative but striking thoughts about this concept. He shows us that ‘singularity’ has already taken place through innovations like the Google’s driverless cars. These modernisations change our society since it creates job-losses in this case but could go further and leads us to calling us into question: what are the boundaries between human and nonhuman?

In this sense, my fear of the Artificial Intelligence and robotic hegemony was explained in the book through the theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky’s words: “The AI does not love or hate you, but you are made out of atoms it can use for something else.’ Therefore, it just tells us to be careful and precise in our demand to what we create in order to keep our power on the machines and the boundaries will be drawn correctly. But looking at the people described in this book, I’m not sure we’re on the right track… However, we could point out on the fact that O’Connell’s description of his encounters fails to give the transhumanists an acute sense of humanity. They are portrayed as caricatures rather than individuals with whom you could actually sympathise or interact. In every movement you can find extremists and it seems that To Be a Machine only illustrate the transhumanism’s extremists. Or am I just saying that to re-assure myself on our future?

To Be a Machine is an investigation to understand the transhumanist movement. It is an approachable book for anyone interested in the depiction of the world our children are about to grow up in. Even if Istvan, De Grey and others have been written about AI and transhumanism before, in this book, we follow O’Connell’s portray of a large community by meeting people with different objectives but all living for a same belief. It is not only a story about our future but it is also telling the story of different individuals living their lives in an uncommon way in the shadow of the Sillicon Valley and libertarian America.

This book should be read by all. We need to be aware of the potential dystopian future which awaits us. O’Connell makes us acknowledge these people innovating ideas without our greeting. He might have taken the extremists ones but it works and makes us want to react. In my opinion, this book is mainly addressed to the millennials for whom lives will be set in these conditions, it asks them to be active and control the technology in order to evolve safely through the years.  As one of the transhumanist’s leaders, Todd Huffman, said: ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it’ and To Be a Machine makes us realise that we don’t want people like O’Connell’s encounters to create the world of our children.