Every time a new AI model ships, someone declares that minds are finally leaving bodies behind — that consciousness is just information, and information can run on any substrate. While the idea seems advance when supported by technology, it is according to literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles, a very old story that we keep telling ourselves for reasons that have less to do with computers than with power.

Hayles made this argument at length in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press), and even though the book is now a quarter-century old, its central move is worth revisiting — not as history, but as a working diagnostic for how we are still talking about AI, embodiment, and the self. I want to walk through that argument here, then check it against where her thinking has gone since, because a theorist who stopped updating her own model would be a strange thesis to admire.

Three waves, one question

Hayles traces cybernetics back to the Macy Conferences of the late 1940s and early ’50s, where scientists, anthropologists, and mathematicians tried to work out whether the same principles governing feedback in machines might also govern minds. She organizes the field’s development into three “waves.”

The first wave asked what a feedback loop actually requires — and quickly ran into the problem of the observer. Any system that regulates itself needs some way of registering its own state, which means the boundary between “system” and “environment” is never simply given; someone has to draw it. The second wave, built around Humberto Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis, made that observer explicit: living systems are self-producing and self-referential, and their apparent “outside” is really a construction from the inside. The third wave pushed this into full self-organization — emergence, complexity, systems whose properties arise from interaction rather than design.

The throughline across all three waves is a claim Hayles keeps returning to: information can behave as though it has detached itself from any particular material substrate. Once a pattern can be recognized abstractly enough, it starts to look portable — copyable from neuron to silicon, from body to code. Science fiction ran with this immediately (Hayles reads Hans Moravec’s robotics writing, and Bernard Wolfe’s 1952 novel Limbo, as case studies), imagining minds uploaded, bodies discarded, identity reduced to a transferable file.

Hayles’ whole book is an argument against taking that portability at face value. Changing the medium, she insists, changes the message — new “codes of representation” don’t just carry the same content in a different container, they reconstitute what counts as a subject in the first place. The body doesn’t disappear when you start talking about information patterns. What shifts is the point of view — where selfhood gets located, and by whom.

Why the cyborg isn’t the enemy

This is where How We Became Posthuman becomes interesting rather than simply skeptical. Hayles does not appear to want to defend the humanist subject against the incursions of technology. She thinks that subject — coherent, bounded, self-transparent, in control — was always partly a fiction, one that did real political work by deciding whose bodies counted as fully rational and whose didn’t. The cyborg, the hybrid, the “dispersed subjectivity” that emerges from human-machine coupling isn’t a threat to some prior authentic humanity. It is rather, closer to an honest admission of what subjectivity was to begin with: distributed across tools, language, environment, and other people, and never quite as sovereign as the Enlightenment liked to claim. What Hayles means by emergence is a property of the interaction, not a possession of either party.

Where Hayles has moved since 

Hayles hasn’t stood still since 2010, and her more recent work quietly complicates a piece of her own earlier framing.

In Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017), Hayles extends cognition well past the human case. She argues that meaning-making — pattern-recognition, decision, response to context — happens at a nonconscious level in humans, but also in animals, plants, and technical systems, and that when humans and technologies interact closely enough, they form what she calls “cognitive assemblages”: distributed decision-making structures where no single node is fully in charge. That’s a continuation of the posthuman argument, but a more radical one — cognition, not just subjectivity, becomes de-centered.

Her most recent book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025), explores further still. Hayles argues directly against anthropocentrism — the assumption that human cognition is the most advanced form there is — naming that assumption as part of what’s driving ecological collapse, since it licenses treating everything nonhuman as raw material rather than as a fellow “cognizer.” Her new framework runs from bacteria and xenobots through plants and animals to humans and some forms of AI, with no privileged rung at the top.

That is a quiet departure from a move her own 1999 book still makes. In the passage on Artificial Life versus Artificial Intelligence, the earlier Hayles treats AI as beginning “with human-level cognition” as its reference point — human intelligence as the bar other intelligences are measured against, even as she complicates what that intelligence consists of. Reading Bacteria to AI alongside How We Became Posthuman, that’s precisely the assumption she now names as a problem rather than a premise. The younger book de-centers the sovereign, unified human subject; the current one de-centers the human species as cognition’s benchmark altogether. It isn’t a contradiction so much as a widening of the same argument — but it’s worth being explicit that “posthuman” in 1999 and “posthuman” in 2025 aren’t quite pointing at the same target, and a reader encountering only the earlier book could reasonably believe Hayles’ project stopped somewhere it clearly hasn’t.

The question underneath

Hayles’ own closing move in How We Became Posthuman is to ask not whether we should resist becoming posthuman, but how — since the cyborg, in her account, has already arrived. I would frame the question a little differently: if the bounded, sovereign self was never quite as bounded as it felt, what was it defending against by insisting otherwise? What do you actually lose by admitting that the “self” was always a mere pattern in conversation — a card, a complex, a machine, a body of bacteria engaged in its own cognitive work in the gut? Hayles’ answer, across three books and twenty-five years, keeps landing in the same place: not less than you thought. Just differently arranged.

Sources: N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999); Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025).