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 an IT professional 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).

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What Readers are Saying

“This book is very much needed. I am incredibly supportive of it and of its brave message.”

-Professor Clare Saunders, professor in politics, Exeter University

“Human relationships, and life itself, are engineered more and more through technologies controlled by megalomaniac tycoons. The Age of Humachines offers a diagnosis of the tech fetishism of our era, maps the routes being taken by the Big Tech juggernaut, and looks to radical-democratic ways of stopping it before it’s too late. Essential reading for our dystopian age.”

-Dr. Gareth Dale, head of social and political sciences, Brunel University

“The Age of Humachines is a real change-the-world book! It’s an encyclopedia of the technological threats facing us which also holds out hope for a future based on human ingenuity, creativity, and common sense.”

-Mark Dunhill, artist and former dean of academic studies, Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London

“A nice bridging of AI/digital economy with ecological economics.”

-Professor Giorgos Kallis, Autonomous University of Barcelona, author of Degrowth

“Sweeping in scope, scholarly yet accessible to the layperson, The Age of Humachines is a must-read for all who wonder where high-tech capitalism is taking us. Tech books will come and go, quickly outdated by the uncorked rate of artificial intelligence and robotics capabilities. The Age of Humachines is different and timeless, grounded as it is in moral philosophy, the meaning of humanity and limits to growth on a finite planet. It’s a rare book that puts an upside to limits, and this one posits the biggest upside of all: the survival of Homo sapiens with our biological and spiritual integrity triumphantly intact.”

-Brian Czech, founder of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy