Question: This email message, like most of the email found in the inbox of your computer's email program, was written and sent by a person, and not by some disembodied intelligent machine. However, these days, it's possible to imagine that this message was machine-generated. In your books, Holding On to Reality and How We Became Posthuman you both discuss how we got to this point. Could you summarize briefly, as a place to begin?
Albert Borgmann: Your scenario shows that today we are dealing with a new kind of information we may call technological information. It was preceded first by natural information—tracks, smoke, fire rings. Such information (it still is all about us) can leave us uncertain as to who the person was that left tracks or built a fire in the distance. Natural information was followed by cultural information, best represented by writing—a story, for instance. Such a story may give us the picture of a fictional person. But here we are actively engaged in bringing the person to life and hardly confused about whether or not there is an actual person...
N. Katherine Hayles: In How We Became Posthuman, I tell three interrelated stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it was conceptualized as an entity that can flow between substrates but is not identical with its material bases; how the cyborg emerged as a technological and cultural construction in the post-World War II period; and the transformation from the human to the posthuman. All three stories are relevant to seeing an email message and not knowing if it was human or machine-generated...
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