To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

"So Mark O’Connell has written a very witty, clever book. He’s a good journalist. Another one of the debates we had around the table, as judges, was the difference between literary writing and journalism. How to Survive a Plague is extremely good journalism. To Be a Machine is extremely good journalism. But the ambition of both An Odyssey and Border is to be works of literature rather than works of journalism. Can a work of journalism win over a work of literature? And it can. There was a debate—and I’m not going to reveal who said what and who voted how—but in the end it was a unanimous decision that How to Survive a Plague should win. To Be a Machine is a great piece of journalism by the Irish journalist, Mark O’Connell. He’s gone to America and met all these wacky characters. Essentially, they are men with low emotional intelligence but high egos, who cannot imagine themselves ceasing to exist. So they seek to, and believe rather madly in, prolonging their lives forever—either because they’ve been converted into computer algorithms or because they’ve been cryogenically preserved and will get brought to life again in the future. Both those themes are in it. “It made what’s left of my hair stand on end. And it also made me laugh.” It’s a work, therefore, of craziness, humour and mad science fiction. Mark O’Connell, on his tours interviewing these lunatics in the Midwest, occasionally comes back and sees his family. It roots him, because there he is with this human relationship with his family. It makes everything he’s been researching sound slightly mad. But when I say they’re lunatics in America, that’s a personal point of view. Because there are some people who take this very seriously. And some people say that with rapid development of artificial intelligence some of this—what is apparently science fiction—will one day become reality. Personally, I hope not. But there you go. When I used to work in factual TV years and years ago, if ever we wanted to put some lunatic eccentrics who were funny on screen we’d just go to America for two weeks and do some filming. It’s a rich tapestry of eccentricity, that country, and Mark O’Connell brilliantly exploits that. Personally, none whatsoever. I’m much more interested in how we get on with each other, as human beings. That’s why I wrote The Empathy Instinct . We’ve got quite enough problems at the moment. We’re now under the yoke of the algorithms of Google and Facebook daily, and nobody’s quite worked out how powerful they are. To add this as well is quite appalling, in my view. It made what’s left of my hair stand on end. And it also made me laugh. And a few other things. Absolutely crazy."