God, Human, Animal, Machine

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.