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Mark O'Connell Biography

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“The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.”

ScienceHistoryVictoryOddsLong Odds
Book:To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
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“I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.”

MetaphorImmortalityTexasBusEntropyTranshumanism
Book:To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
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“In this messianic vision, machine intelligence will come to redeem the universe of its incalculable stupidity. He takes a goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind of corporate project-management structure, composed of a series of key deliverables across deep time.”

UniverseStupidityAiCosmologyMessiahProject ManagementVisionsGoal OrientedMachine IntelligenceDeliverables
Book:To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
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“These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.”

HumanityLaughterMachinesRobotsInhumanFallingSuvToasterSemiautomatic Rifle
Book:To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
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“It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.”

ReligionTechnologyLongingSicknessDecayHuman BodyTranscendenceImpotenceTranshumanism
Book:To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
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“Much like Ros’s novels, then, The Room is remarkable for the way it seems to expose the absurd artifices of its form by getting everything about that form so flagrantly wrong. Wiseau’s failure to achieve the clichés he seems to aim for at the level of plot, dialogue, and performance eventually starts to look like aesthetic subversion.”

The RoomWiseau
Book:Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
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