A computer illustration of people in cryogenic podsNo end in sight
Steven Poole
To Be a Machine: Adventures Among
Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers and the
Futurists Solving the Modest Problem
of Death
by Mark O’Connell
Granta, £12.99, pp. 238
Are you a deathist? A deathist is someone
who accepts the fact of death, who thinks the
ongoing massacre of us all by ageing is not
a scandal. A deathist even insists that death
is valuable: that the only thing that gives life
meaning is the fact that it ends — an idea not
necessarily embraced by someone about to
be murdered on video by an Isis fanatic.
But what is the alternative? There has
never been one, which is why until recently
no one needed to coin the term ‘deathist’.
But now many tech entrepreneurs and sci-
entists take a different view: death, they say,
is simply an engineering challenge. Biotech-
nology should, in principle, be able to reverse
the wear-and-tear on cellular machinery in
our bodies and keep us in our prime indefi-
nitely, barring violent accident. Consider how
many lives this would save. If you think such
research should not be pursued, then you are
a throwback, a deathist, a morose Luddite
thanatophile.
Anti-deathism is one of the main strands
of a set of sci-fi dreams that come under the
umbrella term ‘transhumanism’, the subject
of the Irish literary critic Mark O’Connell’s
engaging tour. He visits a cryonics facility in
the desert outside Phoenix, where customers
have paid to have their whole bodies or just
their heads (called, Greekly, ‘cephalons’ in
the facility’s distancing jargon) preserved
by freezing, in the hope that science will
one day figure out how to revive them. He
goes to a robotics fair where the audience
gasps at humanoid robots that can operate
door handles or ‘egress’ successfully from
a car. He hangs out with a gang of ‘grinder’
cyborgs, that like to implant boxes of elec-
tronics under their skin in order to, say, be
able to sense the presence of an electro-
magnetic field. He interviews people work-
ing on the idea of ‘uploading’ human minds
to computers, and those — like the philos-
opher Nick Bostrom — who fear that one
day soon they, and we, might be killed by
an omnipotent artificial intelligence of our
own creation.
This is all related in a sort of wryly
melancholy version of gonzo narrative non-
fiction, structured in the simple ‘What I Did
Next For My Research’ style. Think a more
overtly erudite version of Jon Ronson. As
with that writer, you do occasionally feel
that O’Connell is expending energy on a less
interesting figure simply because they pro-
vide so much freakish colour. Some of his
transhumanist subjects are pitiful (the virgin-
al man who looks forward to ‘sexbots’) but
others — for instance, the American scientist
Laura Deming, who focuses on ‘life exten-
sion’ research — are extremely intelligent
and persuasive. Overall, the book is thought-
ful, modestly unsure of its own opinion, and
often disarmingly funny. (Cryogenically fro-
zen brains are left in their skulls, O’Connellexplains, because ‘technically, it is kind of a
hassle to remove the thing entirely’.)
The author is especially alert to the
assumptions encoded within tech-utopian
rhetoric — for example, the habit of saying
that we should ‘solve’ death:
The word ‘solve’ seemed to me to encapsu-
late the Silicon Valley ideology whereby all
of life could neatly be divided into prob-
lems and solutions — solutions that always
took the form of some or other application
of technology.And the very prefix ‘trans-’ in the word tran-
shumanism expresses, for some, a forlorn
desire for spiritual transcendence of mere
meat. As one cyborg tinkerer explains to the
author:
Ask anyone who’s transgender. They’ll tell
you they’re trapped in the wrong body. But
me, I’m trapped in the wrong body because
I’m trapped in a body. All bodies are the
wrong body.The apparent paradox, then, is that so
many transhumanists, while bent on defeat-
ing or ‘solving’ death, also seem rather, well,
misanthropic. To be transhumanist is on
some level also to be anti-humanist: people
tell O’Connell what contemptible ‘monkeys’
current humans are, how disgusting it is that
they are doing all this breeding, and how
they’d rather be machine-based conscious-
nesses exploring the vastness of space. But
when it comes down to it, you might think
there is not all that much to distinguish this,
as a consummation devoutly to be wished,
from good old-fashioned death.GETTY IMAGES