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Where does my body begin? Where does it end? What is inside my body? What is outside? What is primary? What is secondary? What is natural? What is artificial?
Science fiction has long imagined a future fusion of humanity with technology. Today, many of us—especially people with health issues such as autoimmune diseases—have functionally become hybrids connected to other machines and to other bodies. The combination of artificial intelligence with implants, transplants, prostheses, and genetic reprogramming is transforming medical research and treatment, and it is now also transforming what we thought was human nature.
Mark C. Taylor identifies this process as “intervolution” and explores how it is weaving together smart things and smart bodies to create new forms of life. Our wired bodies are no longer freestanding individuals, but interconnected nodes in worldwide networks. Recognizing this transformation overturns deeply entrenched distinctions and oppositions between minds and bodies. Intervolution reveals that we are already cyborgs, integral cogs in what will become a superorganism of bodies and things.
— Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Imagine your body. Imagine in it an artificial pancreas, and in the pancreas, an artificial brain. Now imagine that brain networked to—and learning from—thousands of matching pancreas-brains. What you are now imagining Mark C. Taylor has experienced and turns here into an absolutely riveting introduction into how artificial intelligence will transform us from the inside out.
— Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Stimulated by his experience with the insulin pump, Taylor elegantly explores the potential of high-speed networked computers, mobile devices, miniature sensors, big data, and artificial intelligence to create breakthroughs for the human condition. Machines will enable humans to transcend our biologic roots. This is an intellectually provocative glimpse at the future of human health.
— Toby Cosgrove, CEO Emeritus, Cleveland Clinic
Contributes importantly to the discourse on the intersection of biology and technology...Highly recommended.
He explains even monstrously difficult ideas with patience and very little jargon, introducing the basics of network theory, complexity theory, immunology, surveillance economics, and Hegelian philosophy to anyone willing to sit down with the book.
Taylor’s book is well written and will be accessible to nonspecialist readers.
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Our Bodies Our Selves
2. Intranet of the Body
3. Internet of Things
4. Internet of Bodies
5. Intervolutionary Future
Notes
Index