God, Human, Animal, Machine
Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
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God, Human, Animal, Machine
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Narrated by:
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Rebecca Lowman
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By:
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Meghan O'Gieblyn
About this listen
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. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future."—Phillip Lopate
“[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein
For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking.
Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.
©2021 Meghan O'Gieblyn (P)2021 Random House AudioCritic Reviews
Recipient of the Benjamin Hadley Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology
Featured on the New York Times Book Review’s Paperback Row
“O’Gieblyn’s loosely linked and rigorously thoughtful meditations on technology, humanity and religion mount a convincing and occasionally moving apologia for that ineliminable wrench in the system, the element that not only browses and buys but feels: the embattled, anachronistic and indispensable self. God, Human, Animal, Machine is a hybrid beast, a remarkably erudite work of history, criticism and philosophy, but it is also, crucially, a memoir.”—The New York Times
“Meghan O’Gieblyn’s essays are 'personal' in that they are portraits of the private thoughts, curiosities, and uncertainties that thrive in O’Gieblyn’s mind about selfhood, meaning, moral responsibility, and faith. There's nowhere her avid intellect won't go in its quest to find, if not 'meaning,' then the available modern tools we might use, today, as humans, to create it. 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
"A fascinating exploration of our enchantment with technology."—Eula Biss, author of Having and Being Had