Sam Guglani talks to journalist, essayist and literary critic Mark O’Connell, author of ‘To Be a Machine’ (Granta 2017, winner of the Wellcome Prize) and ‘Notes from An Apocalypse:  A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back’ (Granta, 2020).

‘To Be a Machine’ explores transhumanism - using machines to optimise human cognition and extend human life, and the Silicon Valley belief that the human body is an outmoded device. For advocates of transhumanism, death is ‘wrong’ - an idea which at first seems difficult but as Sam and Mark discuss, ‘the body as machine’ is not so far from the assumptions that underlie all modern medicine. Mark says “It’s both wrong and right to say we are machines - but we are not just machines. It’s a metaphor and the idea that we are spiritual is also just a metaphor. It all just reduces to language.”

Mortality, what it means to be embodied, our experience of time, and how we view ourselves in relation to nature, and love - and if they are reducible to the mechanistic conceptions of the transhumanists - are topics discussed by Mark and Sam in this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES.

“What else could it be about but love…you could argue that the meaning of life is simply to reproduce,” says Mark, “but that’s another way of talking about love.”

Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas

Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. https://realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/

Image Richard Gilligan/LA Times https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-04-14/mark-oconnell-notes-from-an-apocalypse-intervew