Thales' Well

In this wide-ranging conversation, I met with acclaimed literary theorist, philosopher and technology scholar N. Katherine Hayles, whose pioneering work has reshaped how we understand the boundaries between humans and machines, cognition and computation, biology and code, artificial intelligence and artificial life. We primarily discussed Katherine's new book Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts. We also discuss elements of Hayles' other works such as How We Became Posthuman and Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Hayles has long argued that cognition is not the exclusive domain of conscious, rational minds. In her work, cognition is distributed, embodied, and extended across human, nonhuman, and technical systems. In this chat we explore what it means to take that seriously in a moment when large language models (LLMs), AI, and synthetic biology are reconfiguring the nature of agency and intelligence. [Also available via my other podcast Posthumanism and Technology].   I