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NK N. Katherine Hayles On The Trajectory

“I think that our computational media are our inextricable symbionts. And if all of computational media was fried tonight at midnight, within six months, 90% of the human species would have died.”

The Trajectory · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

“I think that our computational media are our inextricable symbionts. And if all of computational media was fried tonight at midnight, within six months, 90% of the human species would have died.” — N. Katherine Hayles, The Trajectory

The host was asking Hayles about a future in which humans are knitted together with non-biological systems. She interrupts to say that this has already happened. The 90% figure is her own illustration of how far the dependence goes, and she doesn't give a source for it.

Transcript

The Trajectory Around 1:00:57 into the episode
Speaker 2

we sustain a habitable planet, then there's no reason to think why transformation should not continue. And it almost inevitably will. And we could already see, it's already apparent to me and many other people that the future evolutionary trajectories of humans are already entwined with AI.

Speaker 1

…will eventually not just have tools that it holds in its hand, but the knitting into maybe a knitting into things that aren't made of guanine and nucleotides. But there could be knittings into other kinds of things. I'd love to get your sense of, of course, you put a great caveat on the table.

Speaker 2

I can interject for a moment, Dan. I think that's already happened. So I think that our computational media are our inextricable symbionts. And if all of computational media was fried tonight at midnight, within six months, 90% of the human species would have died. So they are our in, we cannot do without computational media.

Speaker 1

Yes. I mean, look, look, that degree of interdependence that's already started to happen. I'm with you. I mean, it's a ladder that's taken us to some greater places. It's also had some unfortunate effects on the greater natural system, but it's also this kind of new dependency and crutch. Luciano…

Speaker 2

we may not. We are not.

Speaker 1

Yeah, our current trajectory is, let's say, not even really considering that. That seems relatively safe to say, for the most part. I mean, there's some people thinking and talking about it, but our general trajectory is not there. The cyborgism element of that is part of this inevitable future, is…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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