Nonhuman Perspective and Evolutionary Thinking in the Human-Machine Relation

Speaker: Chris Danta, Professor of Literature, School of Cybernetics, Australian National University.
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.” Already in the late nineteenth century, English authors Samuel Butler and George Eliot were thinking of machines as living and evolving organisms.
In this talk, Professor Danta will examine how such writers as Dick, Butler, and Eliot rethink what it means to be human by attributing life to their technological environment. He will 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. He will show how writers biologize machines by figuring them as cryptic nonhuman organisms that can merge with and act on behalf of their physical environments. He argues 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.
Tuesday, 14 July 2026, 6pm-7pm
Webb Lecture Theatre, UWA (Geography Building)