With two Eurostar trips in one day on Monday ( to take part in the AFSE Conference in Paris) I raced through Mark O’Connell’s To Be A Machine. It’s an account of the Silicon Valley-centric transhumanist movement – Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, Peter Thiel and Google funding research into immortality, uploading brains out of the feeble human body to alternative ‘substrates’, and so on. It’s a superbly-written book, respectful of its subjects while clearly disagreeing wholly with them – and successfully making the case that this is a religious rather than a scientific movement. The book manages to be both full of insight and very funny. I was aware of this movement – thanks to my ISC colleague Richard Jones’s book ‘Against Transhumanism’ (the clue is in the title) – but had no real idea of its reach among brilliant and influential people one would have never have imagined to be so – well, bonkers is the only word that comes to mind. Bonkers and yet in some cases powerful and very much worth taking seriously for the questions their belief-set raises.

Well worth a read.

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