O’Gieblyn’s book explores the relationship between technology and religion, two realms I hadn’t considered to be closely related before reading this book. One of the recurring themes is that attitudes toward contemporary technology frequently and unexpectedly recapitulate the modes and arguments of the religious tradition. For instance, in an early chapter she likens the transhumanist movement’s obsession with life-after-death to religious thinking on resurrection and the afterlife. It’s a deft argument that points out that the first cognate of the term transhuman occurred in Dante’s Paradiso, when attempting to account for the mode of embodiment for those who found themselves in heaven.

Transhumanist thought is not exactly mainstream (and I’ve noted a similar parallel in science fiction books such as Greg Egan’s Permutation City) but O’Gieblyn also shows how the epistemological trust once conferred on divine authority has now to some extent been transferred to machine learning algorithms. While a religious believer might be chastened not to trust their fallible human rationality, it seems almost inevitable that the prestige of machine learning and AI will lead to parallel conclusions. I wasn’t aware of Chris Anderson’s 2008 article that proclaimed the obsolescence of the scientific method , but as time passes, the argument seems less provocation and more foreshadowing.

As God Human Animal Machine progresses, the author weaves the intellectual threads of her account together with poignant personal perspectives, which keeps the book engaging while simultaneously asking what role the subjective, feeling self should have in relation to these impersonal forces. At the heart of our relationship with technology is how our messy, emotional, real human lives interact with the algorithmic and impersonal world. Do we downplay technology at the risk of becoming obsolete, capricious, fallible? Or do we blindly subjugate our individual opinions to the seemingly objective world of technology, risking losing what makes us most human? For most of us, it’s a constant negotiation between two worlds that often seem incompatible with one another.

In an unlikely but thoroughly enjoyable twist, O’Gieblyn traces the heart of this tension to the scholastic debate over nominalism versus realism. The argument, per Hans Blumenberg, is that “the trauma of lost universals” (the notion that Platonic universals such as Justice or Beauty do not exist) “created an intolerable situation, one that reached the point of crisis in the thought experiments of Descartes” (215). By this genealogy, the theological debate that eroded the belief in universals had the downstream effect of shaping a humanistic modern subject, eternally doubtful of any truth beyond one’s own cognitive processes. It’s easy to see the skepticism at the heart of the nominalist debate as a kind of recurrent force of intellectual history that crops up every hundred years or so to proclaim that God is dead or that the relationship between the signifier and signified is completely arbitrary.

For sake of the argument about technology, we see the subtle manifestations of the post-nominalist worldview in the rise of modern technology – for if the world is unknowable in its true essence or nature (because no such truth exists), then perhaps an AI-generated answer is just as good as one generated by human culture and/or cogitation. Descartes' thought experiment of being controlled by a demon seems to anticipate simulation theories of living in a matrix. And finally, if we have become disenchanted with the world as it is, then perhaps the toys of our own invention are the only ones shiny enough to re-enchant us.