Humanity has had a complicated relationship with machines and technology for centuries. While we created these inventions to make our lives easier, and have become heavily reliant upon them, we have often feared their impact on society.
In her debut book, The Body Digital: a Brief History of Humans and Machines from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT, Vanessa Chang tells the story of this symbiotic partnership, covering tools as diverse as the self-playing piano and generative AI products. The short book combines creative storytelling, an inward look at our bodies and interpersonal relationships, and a detailed history of invention. Chang – who is the director of programmes at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology in California – offers us a framework for examining future worlds based on the relationship between humanity and machines.
“Technology” has no easy definition. The Body Digital therefore takes a broad approach, looking at software, machines, infrastructure and tools. Chang examines objects as mundane as the pen and as complex as the road networks that define our cities. She focuses on the interplay between machine and human: how tools have lightened our load and become embedded in our behaviour. In doing this she asks the reader: is it possible for the human body to extract itself from technology?
Each chapter of the book centres on a different part of the human anatomy – hand, voice, ear, eye, foot, body and mind – looking at the historical relationship between that body part and technology. Chang follows this thread through to the modern day and the large-scale impact these technologies have had on the development of our communities, communications and social structures. The chapters are a vehicle for Chang to present interesting pieces of history and discussions about society and culture. Her explanations are tightly knit, and the book covers huge ground in its relatively concise page count.
Chang avoids “doomerism”, remaining even-handed about our reservations towards technological advancement. She is careful in her discussion of new technology, particularly those that are often fraught in the public discourse, such as the use of generative AI in creating art, and the potential harms of facial-recognition software.
She includes genuine concerns – like biases creeping into training data for large language models – but mitigates these fears by discussing how technologies have become enmeshed in human culture through history. Our fear of some technologies has been unfounded – take, for example, the idea that the self-playing piano would supersede live piano concerts. These debates, Chang argues, have happened throughout the history of technology, and some of the same arguments from the past can easily be applied to future technology.
While this commentary is often thought-provoking, it sometimes doesn’t go as far as it might. There is relatively limited discussion throughout the book about the technological ecosystem we currently live in and how that might impact our level of optimism about the future. In particular, the topics of human labour being supplanted by machine labour, and the impacts of tech monoliths like Apple and Google, are relatively minimal.
In one example, Chang discusses the ways in which “telecommunication technologies might serve as channels into the afterlife”, allowing us to use technology to artificially recreate the voices of our loved ones after death. While the book contains a full discussion of how uncanny and alarming this type of “artistic necrophilia” might be, Chang tempers fear by pointing out that by being careful with our data, careful with our digital selves, we might be able to “mitigate the transformation of [our] voices into pure commodities”. However, the questions of who controls our data, the relationship between data and capital, and the level of control that we have over the use of our data, is somewhat limited.
Poetic technology
The difference between offering interesting ideas and overexplaining is a hard needle to thread, and one that Chang navigates successfully. One striking feature of The Body Digital is the quality of the prose. Chang has a background in fiction writing and her descriptions reflect this. An automaton is anthropomorphized as a “petite, barefoot boy” with a “cloud of brown hair”; and the humble footpath is described as “veer[ing] at a jaunty angle from the pavement, an unruly alternative to concrete”. As a consequence, her ideas are interesting and memorable, making the book readable and often moving.
Particularly impressive is Chang’s attitude to exposition, which mimics fiction’s age-old adage of “show, don’t tell”. She gives the reader enough information to learn something new in context and ask follow-up questions, without banging the reader over the head with an answer to these questions. The book mimics the same relationship between the written word and human consciousness that Chang discusses within it. The Body Digital marinates with the reader in the way any good novel might, while teaching them something new.
The result is a poetic and well-observed text, which offers the reader a different way of understanding humanity’s relationship with technology. It reminds us that we have coexisted with machines throughout the history of our species, and that they have been helpful and positively shaped the direction of our world. While she covers too much ground to gaze in any one direction for too long, the reader is likely to come away enriched and perhaps even hopeful. And, as Chang points out, we have the opportunity to shape the future of technology, by “attending to the rich, idiosyncratic intelligence of our bodies”.
- 2025 Melville House Publishing 256pp £14.99 pb / £9.49 ebook
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