God, Human, Animal, Machine

This book is simultaneously so exhilarating and creepy that it had me yelling at my car’s sound system as I listened to it! O’Gieblyn uses biography, history, and current events to ask why humans are pursuing artificial intelligence and what it means for the value of being human.

She weaves her life story, including losing her fundamentalist faith and spiraling into addiction, into a riveting analysis of artificial intelligence with all its promise and peril. I loved that she gave historical background about our search for artificial intelligence while also explaining what is at stake as AI infiltrates our very… show more.

I loved this book because it raises challenging questions about AI, and made me think about what intelligence, creativity, and having agency over your decisions means.

A shovel doesn't know it’s a shovel. It can lift more dirt much faster than our bare hands, but that doesn’t mean it is more intelligent than humans. I love books that are provocative, that make me think about things in a different way. This book is one of those. 

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… show more.

Those who laid the foundations for the scientific revolution—Newton, Bacon, Descartes—were religious men. But, so the story goes, science has now left religion behind—except it hasn’t. In this extraordinary book, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues that, having turned its back on God, science and technology are now sleepwalking us into a new religion: transhumanism. Faced with the increasing and enormous complexity of artificial intelligence, like priests interpreting the oracle, the programmers and analysts of today must simply guess how an algorithm has arrived at a particular solution—and have faith that it is correct. They lust for the Rapture-like Singularity, where machines… show more.