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

ByAnnelize Potgieter October 9, 2026October 9, 2026 October 9, 2026

This new installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English at UCLA and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature at Duke University.

What distinguishes Katherine’s approach is that she defines life through cognition, which she defines as a process of interpreting information in contexts that connect it with meaning. By her criteria, plants and bacteria are cognitive, AI systems are cognitive with important caveats, and tornadoes and avalanches have tremendous agency but are not cognitive. A lot of her work is directed at suggesting alternatives to anthropocentrism, by thinking about human cognition in relation to the cognitive capacities of other living organisms, including animals and plants

In this conversation, Katherine argues that the value of life is that it is the pathway to complexity, explains why she sees AI not as a living system but as a symbiont, and discusses how natural computing, the understanding of biological mechanisms as analog computation, gives us a way to build bridges between the biosphere and the technosphere.

The interview is the eighth installment in The Trajectory’s Stewarding the Flame series, where we ask: What is intelligence, and what is the “flame” that life has, which non-life does not?

This series references the article: Stewarding the Flame – How to Build an Ideal Future for Intelligence.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation with Katherine Hayles:

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Below, we’ll explore the core takeaways from my conversation with Katherine, focusing on three of the central questions that shape the Stewarding the Flame series: what makes life, life, what humanity still needs to discover in order to better understand the living process, and what we should do for the greater process of life to flourish.

What Makes Life, Life?

For Katherine, life is made up of organisms that have cognitive capacities. She defines cognition as a process of interpreting information in contexts that connect it with meaning, and identifies five criteria cognitive systems exhibit, captured in the acronym SIRAL: sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, and learning. Even plants, which do not have brains, and microorganisms like bacteria have been shown to fulfill these criteria.

She defines agency as the power to make things happen. Tornadoes, hurricanes, and avalanches have tremendous agency, but they cannot choose or select. In her view, that capacity for choice or selection is what distinguishes living systems from physical processes. Selection draws on an evolutionarily derived repertoire of behaviors, while choice involves a conscious or non-conscious decision. As she puts it, mammals with brains make choices; plants make selections. 

By her criteria, AI systems are cognitive, with some important caveats, one being that their environments are purely artificial. But she would not say AI is alive. It is a symbiont that depends on humans to provide its sustenance, its energy requirements, and its maintenance, and together they form what she calls a cognitive assemblage of a living system and a non-living system.

For Katherine, the value of life is that it is the pathway to complexity: chemical all the way up from the amino acids, conceptual in mathematical theorems, symphonies, and literature, and practiced at all scales. She thinks it is a mistake to showcase the value of life in conscious experience, since non-conscious cognition is far greater than conscious cognition.

“For me, the value of life is that it is the pathway to complexity.”

What Do We Still Need to Discover to Understand the Flame?

For Katherine, a lot of our present environmental crises directly result from anthropocentrism. One alternative she proposes is to think about human cognition in relation to the cognitive capacities of other living organisms. In context, we’re not necessarily the smartest: dogs are far smarter than humans when it comes to what they can smell. Extending that relationality to AI is the basis of what she calls the integrated cognitive framework.

In the book she is now finishing, Katherine describes a paradigm shift underway in biology: natural computing, in which biological mechanisms are understood as computational mechanisms, as analog mechanisms, not digital ones. She compares the moment to Darwin and to plate tectonics, when a framework came along to organize a huge mass of observations.

Digital computation starts with an abstraction, erasing what she calls the noise of materiality to give a clean binary system. Analog computation starts with building a model: a plant knows nothing about numbers, but it can measure variables in its environment and work with them. Digital computation is hegemonic in the technosphere, analog computation is hegemonic in the biosphere, and in both, the result is cognition. Understanding this, she argues, gives us a way to build bridges between the two that didn’t exist before.

For connecting the two, she sees hybrid systems as the answer. Propagating data across multiple systems is the big advantage of digital systems, while analog systems avoid the so-called Von Neumann bottleneck, which makes them more energy efficient and faster. Conceptually, she calls this an enormous breakthrough, giving us completely new ways to understand the nature-culture divide.

“Whereas digital computation is hegemonic in the technosphere, analog computation is hegemonic in the biosphere.”

What Should We Do if We Want the Greater Process of Life to Flourish?

Katherine agrees that the evolutionary process is not going to stop, but she points to a major consideration: the technosphere is actively degrading the biosphere. If evolutionary processes continue and determine the outcome, the result will be the extinction of humans and most of the other life forms on this planet. The crucial question for our moment in history, posed in an article on planetary intelligence co-authored by Sara Walker, is how to realign our practices and our mindset so that the technosphere can support and enhance the biosphere rather than degrade it.

One of the glaring issues, she says, is to recognize our interdependence with all the other life forms on Earth, and that it isn’t just AI and data centers, but cars, factories, the whole ball of wax. She points to the EU’s Copernicus system, which senses atmosphere and ocean conditions at planetary scale, as the kind of factual basis on which policies can be built. And she argues we need to focus much more on inclusive fitness than individual fitness. Inclusive fitness in the end always wins. Evolution works on populations, not individuals.

If we maintain a sustainable environment, she sees no reason transformation should not continue. Our computational media are already our inextricable symbionts: if all of it was fried tonight at midnight, within six months, 90% of the human species would have died. The most useful future she can imagine is one of intelligence augmentation, using AI to enhance, support, and further develop human cognition. As an educator, she is especially concerned with uses of AI that cause our native intelligence to atrophy.

She also stresses that we are mind bodies, not just minds. Our bodies should be continuing sources of pleasure and joy, even if that’s as simple as sitting in the sun watching the hummingbirds. She has no doubt that our symbiosis with artificial intelligence is going to increase, but she doesn’t see any point where humans evolve to the point where they don’t need physical embodiment.

Concluding Notes

Most conversations about sustainability assume the world is a nearly static whole: get the pieces to click together, keep humans from messing it up, and everything stays as it is. Katherine doesn’t make that assumption. She is frank that species either transform or go extinct, and she expects our symbiosis with AI to keep increasing. As I understand her, sustainability isn’t about keeping every torch happy, but about a sustainable environment in which evolutionary processes go to transformation instead of extinction: a notion of sustainability tied to the flame, not just the individual torches. I find that a compelling way to think about sustainability, and it adds a lot to the dialogue we’re building on The Trajectory.

I don’t know if I’m as pessimistic as she is about the present state of the planet’s treatment, but a lot of it I completely agree with. I’m increasingly of the belief that the way we currently do technology and civilization is somewhat at odds with the rest of the living system, and ideally we’d find ways to garner the energy and food civilization needs with much less harm to the system we’re embedded in. Where I’d push further is on timing. I think merger is arriving relatively soon, and Katherine shares that belief. I also think AGI is probably arriving on relatively short time horizons. Not that Katherine suggested otherwise, but we can’t treat the posthuman trajectory as something to think about once today’s problems are solved. We need considerations for it right here, right now, including how the bio and non-bio can live together, at least initially, in a way that ensures the non-bio actually carries the living process forward.

I’m also not sure that complexity is the point. As Stephen Wolfram might point out, plenty of black holes are vastly more complex than anything we do on this planet. If things were extremely complex but there was no sentience, I don’t know precisely how much value I’d consider that to be. I suspect sentient experience is one kind of value the unfurling living process has bubbled forth, and that there are other treasure chests potentially to be opened as that process continues. Katherine probably has notions of what complexity implies that may overlap with what I’m saying or have more nuance than we got to in this episode.

Her discussion of analog computation may offer some grounds for optimism about connecting the bio and non-bio. I don’t think GPUs by themselves will automatically carry the flame. I think the only way we’re going to have confidence is through a degree of blending and symbiosis between bio and non-bio that, at least initially, is relatively careful and calibrated, and technology breakthroughs that make that connection easier will be a big part of it. I hope her forthcoming book, and the researchers working on these problems, get us closer to a symbiosis that serves the flame itself.

I’m glad you’re here, and I look forward to catching you next time on The Trajectory.

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