Prosthetic Gods: How We Outsourced the Body, the World, and the Mind (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798181297661)

You come from a soft, slow, clawless animal that had no business surviving. It never grew fangs or got faster. It did something stranger. It quit waiting for evolution and started building the upgrades outside its own body.

That is the whole human story, and Prosthetic Gods tells it as one continuous act of theft. The hand axe. Fire. The written word. The wheel, the engine, the telegraph, the vaccine, the airplane, the equation, the network, the edited gene, and now the machine mind. Each one is a power that used to belong to gods, pulled down and put to work by a primate who keeps reaching for the next one before reading what the last one cost.

Because every power sends a bill. The fire that cooked the first meal is cooking the planet. The cure that beat the old plagues bred the new ones. The wing that carried us off the ground carries the disease at the speed of sound. And the judgment we are now building outside our own skulls may be the last thing we ever hand over.

The old myths saw all of it coming. Prometheus chained to his rock. Icarus and the wax. The clay man that would not switch off. They were not stories. They were warnings, filed and ignored.

A.M. Neel, an engineer who cannot look at a built thing without taking it apart, traces four million years of borrowed power to the single question the species has never answered honestly. Who is steering.

For readers of Sapiens, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and The Precipice.