“A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence.”

The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome author Meghan O’Gieblyn for a live-stream discussion of her new book, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. O’Gieblyn will be in conversation with author Ed Simon.

This event is free and open to the public. Book sales are encouraged through the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.

About the book:

For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes’s division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness–i.e., souls–might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence–identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself–urgently require rethinking.

Meghan O’Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.

About the speaker:

MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN is the author of the essay collection Interior States, which was published to wide acclaim and won the Believer Book Award for Nonfiction. Her writing has received three Pushcart Prizes and appeared in The Best American Essays anthology. She writes essays and features for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Wired, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin.

Ed Simon is an Editor-at-Large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books, a contributing editor for the History News Network, and a staff writer at The Millions, which the New York Times has called the “indispensable literary site.” He is the author of several books, most recently  Furnace of this World; or, 36 Observations about Goodness. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Aeon, Jacobin, Salon, The New Republic and The New York Times among dozens of others.