of literature at Duke University. She is the author of many books, most recently Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational.
Hayles applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts, and reported the following:
On page 99 of Bacteria to AI, readers will encounter speculations about how future interactions with humans and machines will evolve. The main interlocutors on this page are biologist Lynn Margulis (and her son Dorion Sagan) and environmentalist James Lovelock. Margulis and Sagan write that “the future of our machines . . . is less bleak than that of ourselves,” whereas Lovelock envisions a utopian future when intelligent machines, having become “entirely free of human commands because they will have evolved from code written by themselves,” nevertheless will be eager to enlist humans in a grand effort to keep the Earth cool. These are two different versions of what I call “technosymbiosis,” the idea that the evolutionary trajectories of humans and intelligent machines will be from now on inextricably entangled with one another. I call Lovelock’s rosy prediction “wistful,” because it seems highly unlikely, given the anthropogenic global warming that we have already seen, that intelligent machines will suddenly decide they want humans as cooperative partners. It is far more likely, I say, that they will try to exterminate humans as soon as possible.Learn more about Bacteria to AI at the University of Chicago Press website.
Turning from the risky game of prediction to what we already know, I point out that technosymbiosis, the symbiotic relationship between humans and intelligent machines, implies each is interdependent with the other. This means that human decisions are already penetrated at multiple levels with algorithmic calculations, that human agency, far from being “free,” is now entwined with AI in multiple arenas, and human practices are joined together with both nonhuman organisms and intelligent machines in what I call “cognitive assemblages,” collectivities through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. I end the page by alluding to the different forms of embodiment that participants in cognitive assemblages possess: enfleshed bodies for humans, nonhuman bodies with different cognitive capacities than humans, and sensors, actuators and computational media for intelligent machines.
The Page 99 Test works well for Bacteria to AI. It articulates one of the book’s major themes, the emergence of technosymbiosis; the chapter of which it is a part expands on these ideas, showing where technosymbiosis overlaps with previous theories as well as where it departs from them.
The book’s main purpose is to criticize the belief that humans are the dominant species on the planet because of our superior cognition. It draws connections between this belief and our present multiple environmental crises; regarding ourselves as superior, we humans conclude we are entitled to exploit earth’s resources for ourselves, regardless of the cost to the environment and our future prospects for survival. It draws on my previous work to distinguish sharply between cognition and consciousness, noting that conscious creatures are a tiny minority of living beings on earth; most organisms are nonconscious. This does not prevent them, however, from having cognitive capacities. Indeed, I argue that all living creatures possess some cognitive abilities, even plants and microorganisms such as bacteria. Re-imagining our cognition in relation both to nonhumans and to AI is thus an urgent necessity.
The alternative I offer is the Integrated Cognitive Framework, or ICF. ICF contextualizes different kinds of cognition according to the umwelten from which they arise. “Umwelt,” roughly translated as “world surround,” is German biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s term to describe the different worlds that species construct for themselves. No entity, including humans, can see reality “objectively”; each species builds its world through its specific cognitive, sensory and physical abilities, including the worlds that computational media construct through their affordances. Learning about and respecting the umwelten of other biological species and AI—our nonhuman symbionts-- will be crucially important to our human futures.
--Marshal Zeringue
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