God, Human, Animal, Machine

May 24, 2021
Wired columnist O’Gieblyn (Interior States) explores in this intelligent survey what it means to be human in a technological world. She sets out to examine the ways “artificial intelligence and information technology have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers,” and spotlights how technology has replaced religion in how humans think about life’s big questions. Transhumanism, for example, is a movement that “believe in the power of technology to transform the human race,” and while it doesn’t believe in a soul, its notion of consciousness is not dissimilar. O’Gieblyn adds fascinating insight through accounts of her own struggles with theology and various personal anecdotes, such as her interaction with Sony’s $3,000 robot pet dog (“It took all my strength to drag it up the stairs”). O’Gieblyn has a knack for keeping dense philosophical ideas accessible, and there’s plenty to ponder in her answers to enduring questions about how humans make meaning: “Metaphors,” she writes, “are not merely linguistic tools; they structure how we think about the world.” Razor-sharp, this timely investigation piques. Agent: Matt McGowan, Frances Goldin Literary.

June 1, 2021
An exploration of how technology has co-opted the metaphors of religion, with uncanny and discomfiting results. Essayist O'Gieblyn is a former Bible school student who lost her faith, but living in the real world is no escape from spiritual discourse, especially when it comes to the internet. Much of this intellectually wide-ranging, occasionally knotty book turns on the ways we reflexively apply religious imagery to online life, "constantly, obsessively enchanting the world with life it does not possess." The author begins her considerations concretely, discussing her relationship with an Aibo, a robotic dog loaded with convincingly doggy idiosyncrasies; bonding with the machine, she wonders if humans are built "to see life everywhere we look." And if that's irrational, what's the rational approach? To a surprising degree, she finds, scientists can't escape a kind of modified God-talk despite their learnedness and rigor. They speak of "emergence" of group consciousness online, ponder the mystical unknowability of matter in quantum physics, or propose that we might all be living in a computer simulation, a theory O'Gieblyn reads as old creationist wine in new bottles. The author is a whip-smart stylist who's up to the task of writing about this material journalistically and personally; her considerations encompass string theory, Calvinism, "transhuman" futurists like Ray Kurzweil, and The Brothers Karamazov, which features "a moral drama that for me has lost none of its essential power." Though sometimes overly digressive, toward the end the author sharpens her concern that "enchanting" the internet risks our being blind to how it exploits us: "We are indeed the virus, the ghost in the machine, the bug slowing down a system that would function better, in practically every sense, without us." The machines aren't alive, but that doesn't mean they're not taking over. A melancholy, well-researched tour of faith and tech and the dissatisfactions of both.

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Starred review from July 1, 2021
As a young Fundamentalist, O'Gieblyn defined the human condition through Bible verses declaring that God created the human soul in His image. But when, as part of her intellectual coming-of-age, O'Gieblyn abandoned Christianity, her perspective on humankind changed radically. O'Gieblyn acknowledges that the secular worldview initially depressed her because it severed human life from ultimate meaning. It was, indeed, her metaphysical anxiety that primed her for the transhumanism preached by Ray Kurzweil, ostensibly a completely scientific path to superhuman perfection and immortality achieved through cybertools. But her enthusiasm for this quasi-science waned as she recognized its covert incorporation of Christian aspirations. But transhumanists are hardly the only secularists O'Gieblyn has found denying real humans a coherent place in their thought. Many cosmologists, for instance, believe that the cosmic fine-tuning that incubated intelligent life in this universe was merely a random fluke, not repeated in countless other sterile cosmos. Mandarins of the internet focus on information as the ultimate reality, largely ignoring the humans generating that information. Though O'Gieblyn laces her reflections with scholarship illuminating historical and cultural context, her narrative is ultimately sustained by her very personal account of a painful philosophical evolution. A compelling reminder that the deepest philosophical queries guide and shape life.

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