We Are Already Post-Human

He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. From Silicon Valley to the Vatican, across kitchen tables and in the halls of power, the world is astir over the question of whether humans will be able to control the AIs we’ve created. But that begs the question: What does it mean to be “human”?

One place to start sorting this all out is what Confucian philosophy calls “rectification” — naming things for what they actually are. Katherine Hayles, author of “Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Non-human Symbionts,” we are already “post-human.” As she explained to Claire Webb in a recent Futurology podcast, the concept of “human” is culturally and historically contingent. These days, she says, there is still the dominant view that arose with the Enlightenment of the human as an autonomous, singular entity with “rational free will.” For Hayles, that has never been true because humans have never existed as an entity apart but have always been “woven in the web” of a surrounding environment, or “Umwelt.” It is the symbiotic interactions within that interdependence which determine the signs we sense, the meaningful interpretation of the information we process, the decisions we make, and the actions we take that define who we are.

The most obvious example of our relational interdependence with non-human life is the gut bacteria within us, the biological functions of which we’d perish without. The false notion of self-enclosed human autonomy is even less true today, she argues, because “we are already in a deeply symbiotic relationship with computational media — chips, routers, devices, microwaves, etc. They have become the controllers, processors and disseminators of a flow of information” in which we are inextricably enmeshed — and, in advanced societies, without which we couldn’t survive.

If it all crashed, we couldn’t transport food, fly airplanes or operate the stock market. We’d quite literally live in the dark. As Hayles describes it, this condition amounts to “distributed cognition and distributed decision-making” between human and non-human participants.

She calls these “cognitive assemblages” or “networked intelligence.” In short, we are “post-human” because we are inseparably joined in an “integrated cognitive framework” with computational media. This post-human condition would seem to place us some distance along the continuum toward Singularity, the full fusion of humans and intelligent machines. By definition, this symbiosis blurs the line of who or what is in control.

In a related Futurology podcast, Kevin Kelly tells Nils Gilman that “we are already in the Singularity.” From his northern California perch, Kelly has been surfing the waves of technological innovation and cultural transformation for decades, going back to his time as co-founder of The Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand and then Wired magazine. What Kelly means by “already in” is that human/machine fusion is a presently ongoing process that doesn’t suddenly cross some rapturous threshold, but incrementally unfolds with the accelerated deepening of the “integrated cognitive framework” Hayles talks about. We can’t clearly see the massive change taking place now in its pixelated form, but will only be able to recognize the fuller picture of what has taken place from a future retrospective standpoint.