Dear AI Reader: Nonhuman Perspective and Evolutionary Thinking in the Human-Machine Relation
Chris Danta, in his talk, examines how authors Philip K. Dick, Samuel Butler, and George Eliot articulate machines as living and evolving organisms that propose an environmental understanding of life.
Saturday, May 30, 2026, 10:00 PM EDT – Sunday, May 31, 2026 10:00 AM Perth, Australia and China
Abstract:
Many writers figure machines in evolutionary terms, as living and evolving organisms. The American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick observed in his 1972 speech, “The Android and the Human,” that in the last decade, “our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components—all this is in fact beginning more and more to possess … animation.” Dick cites mid-twentieth-century cybernetics as inspiring his analysis in “The Android and the Human.” But already in the late nineteenth century, the English authors Samuel Butler and George Eliot were thinking of machines as living and evolving organisms. In this paper, I examine how writers like Dick, Butler and Eliot attribute life to their technological environment to critique what I call organo-centrism, the belief that only biological organisms are alive and have value. As well as historicizing the trope of the living, evolving machine, I discuss various speculative rhetorical techniques that writers use to look at the human from the perspective not just of another living organism but also of the surroundings of the human themselves. I show how writers biologize machines by figuring them as cryptic nonhuman organisms that can merge with and act on behalf of their physical environments. I argue that underlying the techno-anthropologies of writers like Dick, Butler and Eliot is an environmental understanding of life as the dyadic relation between the organism and its surroundings.
Participant Bio:
Chris Danta is Professor of Literature and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Cybernetics at the Australia National University in Canberra. His research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science and theology. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism and Metaphor (Cambridge UP, 2018). His articles have appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as New Literary History, American Literature, SubStance, Angelaki, Textual Practice, Literature and Theology and Modernism/modernity. He is currently working on an ARC Future Fellowship with the title “Future Fables: Literature, Evolution and Artificial Intelligence.”
