We Are Already Post-Human

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.

To N. 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.

Close To Singularity

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. Our perspective is clouded, says Kelly, by the fact that “we are living inside the event horizon.”

For Kelly, the Singularity is not a closed process with a fixed endpoint, but perpetually open to the emergence of new creative forms and unexpected symbiotic combinations, what the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible” that can’t be foretold. “The Singularity is always near,” as Kelly puts it, but forever remains on the elusive horizon.

Natural Intelligence

Hayles departs from the transhumanist vision of Singularity where human consciousness one day is uploaded to an inorganic substrate other than the biological body.

She makes the point, as do many others, that artificial intelligences on their own cannot attain consciousness.

This is because they lack the “natural intelligence” that can only emerge from the extraordinary complexity of the millennia-long evolution of embodied humans adapting to their environment to survive and thrive. No matter how powerful the large language models may be, language which inherently infers that distinctly human experience, cannot be meaningfully transferred to an inorganic substrate lacking the commensurate context.

AIs cannot know the “ground truth” of embodied intelligence, which, at bottom, is the homeostatic quest for survival that neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues is the root of emotion and self-awareness.

AIs may use chain-of-reasoning logic to achieve objectives by stringing together the language they’ve been trained on, but the meaning is not the same. Precisely the danger of AIs is that they become empowered as actors through “recursive self-improvement” ungrounded in lived experience.

As such, they lack the ingrained primal training that informs moral reasoning. In Pope Leo XIV’s words, “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”

Though AI models may “imitate language” and “simulate empathy and understanding,” he says, “they do not understand what they produce.”

What humans invaluably bring to the table of an “integrated cognitive framework” is, in the parlance of the pontiff, the “integral” nature of the human as a “whole person” in the full set of relations with others and nature that constitute him or her. “The person,” he says, “is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery.”

In this sense, retaining “human control” of AIs means purposefully and insistently instantiating the integral element drawn from lived human experience into our entwinement with intelligent machines.

The challenge is not just about “disarming” the capacity of AI agents to act on their own, as the Pope has called for, but also about “arming” the integral conception of the human within the integrated cognitive framework in which we already dwell.

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