science

To Be a Machine

To Be a Machine is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand To Be a Machine rather than just read about it. In short: To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death is a 2017 nonfiction book by Slate columnist and literary journalist Mark O'Connell, his debut work. Published by Granta, the book is a breezy, but skeptical, gonzo-journalistic tour of transhumanism and radical life extension.

Key takeaways

To Be a Machine belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect To Be a Machine to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of To Be a Machine from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death is a 2017 nonfiction book by Slate columnist and literary journalist Mark O'Connell, his debut work. Published by Granta, the book is a breezy, but skeptical, gonzo-journalistic tour of transhumanism and radical life extension. It chronicles O'Connell's travels around the world to interview prominent transhumanists.

Description Interviewees range from mainstream figures, such as computer scientist Stuart J. Russell, to more colorful individuals, such as Zoltan Istvan, who ran for the American Presidency on the "Immortality Ticket". Much of the book focuses on radical life extension (the desire to engineer immortality); in addition, O'Connell visits a group of "grinders" in Pittsburgh who surgically implant sensors into themselves. O'Connell makes it clear that he personally chooses to reject transhumanist philosophy, stating that his child playing horsy with his wife could not be "rendered in code... Their beauty was bodily, in the most profound sense, in the saddest and most wonderful sense." The book also examines existential risk from artificial general intelligence, the fear that superintelligent machines will destroy the human race. An oversimplified example would be a machine that is asked to eliminate human cancer, and does so by eliminating all humans. In the book's conclusion, O'Connell declines to offer any predictions about whether the hopes or fears of the transhumanists will come to pass, instead stating: "I have seen the present, and the present is strange enough to be getting along with: filled with strange people, strange ideas, strange machines." To Be a Machine was described by Publishers Weekly as "a stimulating overview of modern scientific realities once thought to be the exclusive purview of science fiction" and in The New York Times review it was characterised as "a wonderful, breezy romp filled with the beginnings of philosophical reflections on the meaning of the techno-utopians’ search for immortality, or as O’Connell puts it, 'solving death.'"

References

External links To Be a Machine (author interview by bookseller) on YouTube

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with To Be a Machine

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what To Be a Machine claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to To Be a Machine before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about To Be a Machine ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of To Be a Machine

In research: To Be a Machine appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses To Be a Machine in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: To Be a Machine is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2017 non-fiction books, Debut books, Futures studies stubs, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for To Be a Machine outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study To Be a Machine in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what To Be a Machine means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain To Be a Machine out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is To Be a Machine in simple terms?

Why does To Be a Machine matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study To Be a Machine?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on To Be a Machine.