num_pages: 256
description: Meet the visionaries billionaires professors and programmers who are using groundbreaking technology to push the limits of the human body our senses intelligence and our lifespansOnce relegated to the fringes of society transhumanism (the use of technology to enhance human intellectual and physical capability) is now poised to enter our cultural mainstream. It has found adherents in Silicon Valley billionaires Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Google has entered the picture establishing a bio-tech subsidiary aimed at solving the problem of aging.In To Be a Machine journalist Mark O'Connell takes a headlong dive into this burgeoning movement. He travels to the laboratories conferences and basements of today's foremost transhumanists where he's presented with the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries of new technologies like mind uploading artificial superintelligence cryonics and device implants.A contributor to Slate The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine O'Connell serves as a sharp and lively guide to the outer limits of technology in the twenty first century. In investigating what it means to be a machine he offers a surprising singular meditation on what it means to be human.
language: English
title: To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
publisher: Doubleday