This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English at UCLA and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature at Duke University, and author of How We Became Posthuman, Unthought, and Bacteria to AI.
Katherine defines life through cognition: a process of interpreting information in contexts that connect it with meaning, marked by five criteria she calls SIRAL (sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, and learning). By that measure, plants and bacteria are cognitive, AI systems are cognitive with important caveats, and tornadoes and avalanches have tremendous agency but no choice.
We explore why she sees life as the pathway to complexity, why she considers AI a symbiont rather than a living system, why the technosphere is currently degrading the biosphere, and how natural computing, the understanding of biological mechanisms as analog computation, may help build bridges between the two.
The interview is the eighth installment of The Trajectory's newest series, Stewarding the Flame, where we explore what intelligence is and ask what "flame" life possesses that non-life does not.
This episode referred to the following other essays and resources: -- Stewarding the Flame - How to Build an Ideal Future for Intelligence: https://danfaggella.com/stewarding -- Lee Cronin - Living Process Flourishes if We Make the Present “Thick” (Stewarding the Flame, Ep 2): https://danfaggella.com/cronin1 -- Stephen Wolfram - In a Sea of Complexity, Does a “Successor” Exist? (Worthy Successor, Episode 22): https://danfaggella.com/wolfram1 -- Stuart Kauffman - Why Open-Ended Evolution Has Never Happened in a Machine (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 5): https://danfaggella.com/kauffman1 -- Luciano Floridi - How Life Could Flourish in the Information Ocean (Worthy Successor, Episode 25): https://danfaggella.com/floridi1 -- Joe Carlsmith - A Wiser, AI-Powered Civilization is the “Successor” (Worthy Successor, Episode 15): https://danfaggella.com/carlsmith1 -- Michael Levin - Making the Process-of-Life Flourish in Bio and Beyond (Stewarding the Flame, Ep 1): https://danfaggella.com/levin2 -- Joscha Bach - Building an AGI to Play the Longest Games (Worthy Successor, Episode 6): https://danfaggella.com/bach1/ -- Michael Johnson - Symmetry, Beauty, and the Shape of Consciousness (Worthy Successor, Episode 17): https://danfaggella.com/johnson1/ -- The Great Mechanization Event - The Shift to Non-Biological Earth-Life: https://danfaggella.com/gme/ -- How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, by N. Katherine Hayles: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3769963.html
AGI and man-machine merger are going to radically expand the process of life beyond humanity -- so how can we ensure a good trajectory for future life?
From Yoshua Bengio to Nick Bostrom, from Michael Levin to Peter Singer, we discuss how to positively influence the trajectory of posthuman life with the greatest minds in AI, biology, philosophy, and policy.
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