N. Katherine Hayles - AI as Our Inextricable Symbionts (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 8)

[upbeat music] This is Daniel Fogeli. You're tuned into The Trajectory, and this is episode eight of our Stewarding the Flame series, where we talk about what the process of life is and how we can encourage it to flourish, including vastly beyond humanity. Our guest in this week's episode is one of the original thinkers of sort of the future of humans, technology, and cognition. That's none other than Dr. Katherine Hayles. Uh, she's the author of a great many books, uh, most notably, for the sake of our conversation here today, uh, How We Became Posthuman, a book written way back in 1999. She's recently written another book about f- the journey from bacteria to AI, where she talks about the ecology of cognition that we live within, and she's still writing books to this day. Uh, Katherine, in this episode, really dives into the foundations of what permits life to thrive and how technology could enhance, but also, in many ways in the world right now, could be decreasing the thrival force of that greater, uh, processing system. I think by the end of this episode, you'll have a better idea of maybe what cognition looks like in the living world, from the microscopic to the very macroscopic, and also, I think, a better idea of sort of how to think about ecologies and what flourishing looks like in our present day, but vastly beyond us as well. I'm gonna save my comments, as usual, for the very end of this episode. Without further ado, let's fly right in. This is Dr. Katherine Hayles here on The Trajectory. So Katherine, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Dan. I'm delighted to be here.

Oh, I am, I am so happy to be able to go deep on this topic with you. After getting a sense of your latest book, uh, with bacteria and AI, and then, and then now having read the vast preponderance of your first book, I knew there'd be so much to unpack. So I wanna open with a question that's big, and nobody has the full answer, but I think you have a much more complete perspective than most. When you define life or the living process, for people who might have a computer science or, uh, maybe a policy or philosophy background, maybe not necessarily a biological background, how do you like to articulate a more full picture of it?

Well, I think of life as, uh, organisms that have cognitive capacities, and in my recent work, uh, I've defined cognition as a process of interpreting information and context that connect it with meaning. And further, I've identified five, uh, criteria that cognitive systems exhibit, and that's signified by the acronym SIRAL, S-I-R-A-L, which stands for sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, and learning. And research has shown that even plants, which do not have brains-

Mm-hmm

... nevertheless have cognitive capacities and are able to exhibit these five criteria. Even microorganisms like bacteria have been shown to fulfill these criteria. So a crucial idea here in the SIRAL, uh, hierarchy, as I call it, because there are feedback loops between each of these functions, behavioral functions, um, cru- crucial here is the idea of responding flexibly. So that eliminates homeostatic mechanisms like a self-filling fish tank. It also