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

Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Books of 2025

Human relationships and life itself are increasingly engineered through technologies controlled by a handful of tech tycoons. In The Age of Humachines, former tech insider Michael D.B. Harvey names this project “humachination,” the merging of humans and machines, and traces it from Silicon Valley’s boardrooms to its wildest transhumanist ambitions. Sweeping across science, economics, psychology, and ecology, Harvey maps how AI, surveillance, and the dream of re-engineering biology serve a new phase of capitalism he calls ontocapitalism, and why “green growth” and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” can’t deliver on a finite planet. But this is not a doom book. It ends with a detailed alternative, a path toward what Harvey calls the Ecocene: sustained degrowth, human wellbeing, and radical democracy. Endorsed by degrowth scholar Giorgos Kallis and steady-state economist Brian Czech, it’s a rare tech critique grounded in moral philosophy and the limits to growth. For readers of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism or Atlas of AI, The Age of Humachines goes one step further, arguing that merging humans and machines was never inevitable and that folks can still refuse it.