Why did I love this book?
I read this book over the summer, a few months after it seemed that every pundit and podcaster was ruminating about A.I. Would ChatGPT take over vast swaths of creative industries, making most of us obsolete or relegating us to the galleys? Would A.I. even doom us as a species?
This book came out a couple of years earlier, but it helped me get my head around all the suddenly urgent questions about human minds, consciousness, and technology. O’Gieblyn brings to bear the insights of major figures in Western philosophy on some fairly abstruse issues in a way that sets a new standard for lucidity. She convinced me that the current crisis over A.I. has been in the works for a while.
And within her elegant reflections on modern philosophy and cybernetics, O’Gieblyn nestles a compelling memoir. She traces her own evolution from a conservative Christian upbringing to atheism, a background that helped her recognize traces of fundamentalist religion in the wild speculations of the visionaries of the transhuman.
You will learn a lot from this book and feel much smarter afterward.
4 authors picked God, Human, Animal, Machine as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States.
"Meghan O’Gieblyn is a brilliant and humble philosopher, and her book is an explosively thought-provoking, candidly personal ride I wished never to end ... This book is such an original synthesis of ideas and disclosures. It introduces what will soon be called the O’Gieblyn genre of essay writing.” —Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our…