ΑΙhub.org
 

The Good Robot podcast: Symbiosis from bacteria to AI with N. Katherine Hayles


by
13 June 2025



share this:
Space scene with words Good Robot Podcast

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.

Symbiosis from bacteria to AI with N. Katherine Hayles

In this episode, we talk to N. Katherine Hayles who’s the distinguished research professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her prolific research focuses on the relationship between science, literature and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. We explore her newest book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts, and discuss how the biological concept of symbiosis can inform the relationships we have with AI; how a neural network experiences the world; and whether ChatGPT can be conscious.

Listen to the episode here:

N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her twelve print books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. of Chicago Press 2015), in addition to over 100 peer-reviewed articles. Her books have won several prizes, including The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines. She has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including two NEH Fellowships, a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

You can find the episode reading list and transcript here.

About The Good Robot Podcast

Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.




The Good Robot Podcast




            AIhub is supported by:


Related posts :



Interview with Kate Candon: Leveraging explicit and implicit feedback in human-robot interactions

  25 Jul 2025
Hear from PhD student Kate about her work on human-robot interactions.

#RoboCup2025: social media round-up part 2

  24 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the second half of RoboCup2025 in Salvador, Brazil.

Visualising the digital transformation of work

Does it matter that the existing images of AI and digital technologies are so unrealistic?

#ICML2025 social media round-up part 2

  22 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the second half of the conference.

#RoboCup2025: social media round-up 1

  21 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the opening days of RoboCup2025 in Salvador, Brazil.

Livestream of RoboCup2025

  18 Jul 2025
Watch the competition live from Salvador!

A behaviour monitoring dataset of wild mammals in the Swiss Alps

  17 Jul 2025
Scientists at EPFL have created MammAlps, a multi-view, multi-modal video dataset that captures how wild mammals behave in the Swiss Alps.

#ICML2025 social media round-up 1

  16 Jul 2025
Find out what participants have been getting up to during the first couple of days of the conference.



 

AIhub is supported by:






©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence