PERSON
N. Katherine Hayles
The literary theorist and philosopher of technology who spent three decades tracking the body that computation keeps trying to leave behind—architect of the posthuman framework, theorist of the flickering signifier and the cognitive assemblage, and the sharpest analyst of what it means to think alongside a machine that does not know it is thinking.
When N. Katherine Hayles published
How We Became Posthuman in 1999, the book arrived as a provocation: the liberal humanist subject—the autonomous individual who originates thought, owns property, and bears rights—was not a natural fact but a historical construction, and information technology was unraveling it. The argument required twenty years for the evidence to catch up, and now it has arrived in force. The
large language models that write emails and pass exams, the developers who cannot tell where their thinking ends and the machine’s processing begins, the engineers who build complete features in domains they never studied—all are living proof of what Hayles had argued from the history of cybernetics and information theory: that cognition is
distributed across biological and technical substrates in ways no single node controls. Her framework offers three interlocking instruments for the AI moment: the re-embodiment