Mark O'Connell has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 8 ratings. The most-rated is To Be a Machine.
To Be a Machine
Summary
Meet the visionaries, billionaires, professors, and programmers who are using groundbreaking technology to push the limits of the human body - our senses, our intelligence, and our lifespans Once relegated to the fringes of society, transhumanism (the use of technology to enhance human intellectual and physical capability) is now poised to enter our cultural mainstream. It has found adherents in Silicon Valley billionaires Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Google has entered the picture, establishing a biotech subsidiary aimed at solving the problem of aging. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell takes a headlong dive into this burgeoning movement. He travels to the laboratories, conferences, and basements of today's foremost transhumanists, where he's presented with the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries of new technologies like mind uploading, artificial superintelligence, cryonics, and device implants. A contributor to Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, O'Connell serves as a sharp and lively guide to the outer limits of technology in the 21st century. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising, singular meditation on what it means to be human.
©2017 Mark O'Connell (P)2017 Random House Audio
Notes from an Apocalypse
Summary
"Harrowing, tender-hearted, and funny as hell." (Jenny Offill) “Fascinating…Oddly uplifting.” (The Economist) "Smart, funny, irreverent, and philosophically rich." (Wall Street Journal) By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine, an absorbing, deeply felt audiobook about our anxious present tense - and coming to grips with the future We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A viral pandemic has the power to draw our global community to a halt. Old postwar alliances are crumbling. Everywhere you look there's an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does it mean to have children - nothing if not an act of hope? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on Earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O'Connell is consumed by these questions - and, as the father of two young children himself, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization's collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to those places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited - real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he comes to a resolution, while offering listeners a unique window into our contemporary imagination. Both investigative and deeply personal, Notes from an Apocalypse is an affecting, humorous, and surprisingly hopeful meditation on our present moment. With insight, humanity, and wit, O'Connell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isn't the end of the world?
©2020 Mark O'Connell (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Smaller Evil
Summary
Sometimes the greater good requires the smaller evil. Seventeen-year-old Arman Dukoff can't remember life without anxiety and chronic illness when he arrives at an expensive self-help retreat in the remote hills of Big Sur. He's taken a huge risk - and $2,000 from his meth-head stepfather - for a chance to "evolve", as Beau, the retreat leader, says. Beau is complicated. A father figure? A cult leader? A con man? Arman's not sure, but more than anyone he's ever met, Beau makes Arman feel something other than what he usually feels - worthless. The retreat compound is secluded in coastal California mountains among towering redwoods, and when the iron gates close behind him, Arman believes for a moment that he can get better. But the program is a blur of jargon, bizarre rituals, and incomprehensible encounters with a beautiful girl. Arman is certain he's failing everything. But Beau disagrees; he thinks Arman has a bright future - though he never says at what. And then, in an instant Arman can't believe or totally recall, Beau is gone. Suicide? Or murder? Arman was the only witness, and now the compound is getting tense. And maybe dangerous. As the mysteries and paradoxes multiply and the hints become accusations, Arman must rely on the person he's always trusted the least: himself.
©2016 Stephanie Kuehn (P)2016 Listening Library