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 fo