About this episode

N. Katherine Hayles discusses the intersection of literature, science, and artificial intelligence, redefining cognition and exploring the relationships between humans and nonhuman entities.

In this episode of See See by Ceci, N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, James B. Duke Professor Emerita at Duke, Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joins us from the rare crossroads at which she has worked for forty years: literature, science, technology and, now, artificial intelligence. Trained as a chemist at Rochester and Caltech before crossing into literary scholarship, she is a foremost authority on the relations between literature and computational media, and the author of How We Became Posthuman (1999) and, most recently, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In this rich and demanding conversation, Hayles redefines cognition as the interpretation of information in contexts that connect with meaning, a capacity she ascribes to bacteria, plants, fungi, animals and, increasingly, AI. She walks us through her integrated cognitive framework and the SIRAL criteria (sensing, interpreting, responding adaptively, anticipating, learning); through von Uexküll's umwelt, the world each species spins for itself; through cognitive assemblages in which humans…

More episodes of See See by Ceci

• Intelligence Without Brains with Toby Kiers · May 27, 2026 · 1h 40m
• Beautiful Wild Minds with Carl Safina · May 13, 2026 · 1h 38m

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the See See by Ceci podcast page.