The Age of Humachines: Big Tech and the Battle for Humanity's Future

Are we sleepwalking through the biggest unregulated social experiment in human history, even as the ecological crises of the 21st century rage around us? In The Age of Humachines, Michael D.B. Harvey argues that technological capitalism has entered a reckless new phase, focused on the fusion of humans and machines. This fusion—“humachination”—is enabled by artificial intelligence and a cultish belief in perpetual economic growth.

Humachination involves a vast array of digital, robotic, genetic, medical, military, industrial and sexual technologies that are rapidly transforming everyday life. The techno-utopians driving this potentially existential revolution seem to consider humachination the solution to every problem. Yet how would they know, with so little expertise aside from computer science? If we let it, is Big Tech more likely to take us to an ecologically ravaged, techno-dystopian surveillance state, with fatal blows to democracy and equality?

To help navigate the struggle for the future, Harvey boldly examines all major aspects of humachination: biological, ecological, economic, social, and political. As a one-time tech entrepreneur turned psychologist, he expertly analyzes the disturbing mind-set of Silicon Valley’s unelected billionaires, including their choice-distorting ideology of individualism and technologism. Their leanings toward “ontocapitalism”—the instilling of humachines with rawboned capitalism—is almost as frightening as the Terminator.

Yet Humachines is decidedly a book about hope. Harvey counters the Big Tech assault on prudence by demonstrating how steady-state economics, the degrowth movement, participatory democracy, life sciences, and radical psychology can inspire us to make the best possible choices. And limits to growth, it turns out, has a substantial upside, as it may be the last defense against unbridled humachination.

Michael D.B. Harvey is an organizational psychologist, political ecologist and former technology entrepreneur, based in London. He is the author of several books, including Interactional Leadership (Routledge, 2015) and Utopia in the Anthropocene (Earthscan/Routledge, 2019).