What is the difference between the technological and the human?  It seems as though we should be able to draw up a balance sheet with two clear columns: typewriters on one side, humans on the other. However, radical postmodern thinker Katherine Hayles argues that our notion of humanity and its separation from what is artificial, synthetic or ‘computational’, is an illusion. In this article, Hayles explains how the ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ columns are merged into a single inter-braided mixture.  

In this era of advanced artificial intelligence, perhaps the most highly charged binary is between an AI (on the technological side) and a human (on the biological). Leaving aside the trend to incorporate more and more technology into human bodies, including pacemakers, insulin pumps, cortical and neural implants, cochlear devices and so forth, humans and our cultures are forming strong symbiotic bonds with computational media in all their forms. There is a reason for this: computational media are the first technologies to have cognitive abilities. Cognition, understood as the ability to sense information from the environment, interpret it, and act in contexts that connect it with meaning, emerged first on Earth in biological bodies. Even one-celled organisms such as bacteria move toward food sources and away from toxins in ways that enable them to continue their existence. In fact all lifeforms, even those that don’t have brains such as plants and clams, have cognitive capacities. Now humans have found ways to create cognition in artificial media, leading to complex interdependencies between cognitive media and cognitive humans in collectivities that I call cognitive assemblages.