Abstract
The article seeks to highlight the relation between ontology and communication while considering the role of AI in society and environment. Bioinformationalism is the technical term that foregrounds this relationality. The study reveals instructive consequences for philosophy of technology in general and AI in particular. The first section introduces the bioinformational approach to AI, focusing on three critical features of the current AI debate: ontology of information, property-based vs. relational AI, and ontology vs. constitution of AI. When applied to the themes of relationality and non-anthropocentric communications, bioinformational insights highlight an inclusive and meaningful groundwork for understanding AI by ‘relating’ it with society and the environment through an engagement with the ongoing critique of human supremacy. In the second section, we move from ‘relating’ AI to ‘rewilding’ AI by proposing taxonomical classification for certain technological entities. We situate our proposal in the broader personhood debate with the proposal of taxonomical ranking. In the last section, we show an instance of a relational approach steeped in substantialist ontology by introducing the fourth feature of the AI debate. A broad critique of Floridi’s philosophy of information introduces this fourth feature from the domain of philosophy and sociology to address various theoretical and ecological problems with current relational accounts. In doing so, we argue for ‘communication’ to be the replacement of ‘information’ as the moral unit. A bioinformational understanding of AI advocates taking ontological commitments seriously at all levels of informational and technological processes and products.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability statement
The data used to support the findings of this study are included within this article.
References
Appiah C, Arndt C, Siemsen K, Heitmann A, Staubitz A, Selhuber-Unkel C (2019) Living materials herald a new era in soft robotics. Adv Mater 31(36):1807747. https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201807747
Bateson G (2000) Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London
Beniger J (1986) The control revolution: economic and technological origins of the information society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Bessant J (2020) Making-up people: youth, truth and politics, 1st edn. Routledge, London. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429296970
Bourdieu P, Wacquant L (1992) An invitation to reflexive sociology. University of Chicago, Chicago
Bowers CA (2012) Gregory Bateson’s contribution to understanding the linguistic roots of the ecological crisis. Trumpeter 28:1
Braidotti R (2013) The posthuman. Polity, Cambridge
Brey P, Søraker JH (2009) Philosophy of computing and information technology. In: Meijers A (ed) Philosophy of technology and engineering sciences, Vol IX, in D. Gabbay, P. Thagard and J. Woods (eds), Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp 1341–1408
Bruderer H (2020) Milestones in analog and digital computing, 2 volumes, 3rd edition, 2113 pages, 715 images (88% in color), 151 tables. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40974-6
Butail S, Ladu F, Spinello D, Porfiri M (2014) Information flow in animal-robot interactions. Entropy. https://doi.org/10.3390/e16031315
Cassirer E (1923) Substance and function. Open Court, Chicago
Coeckelbergh M (2010) The moral standing of machines: towards a relational and non-cartesian moral hermeneutics. Philos Technol 27:61–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0133-8
Coeckelbergh M (2014) Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration. Ethics Inform Technol 12:209–221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-010-9235-5
Daane JM, Blum N, Lanni J, Boldt H, Iovine MK, Higdon CW, Harris MP (2021) Modulation of bioelectric cues in the evolution of flying fishes. Curr Biol 31(22):5052-5061.e5058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.08.054
Deacon TW (2013) Incomplete nature: how mind emerged from matter. W. W. Norton, New York; London
Dewey J, Bentley A (1949) Knowing and the known. Beacon Press, Boston
Dretske FI (1981) Knowledge and the flow of information. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge
Elhacham E, Ben-Uri L, Grozovski J, Bar-On YM, Milo R (2020) Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature 588(7838):442–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5
Elias N (1978) What is sociology? Trans. Morrissey G, Mennell S, Jephcott E. Columbia University Press, New York
Emirbayer M (1997) Manifesto for a relational sociology. Am J Sociol 103:281–317
Ereshefsky M (1991) Species, higher taxa, and the units of evolution. Philos Sci 58(1):84–101. https://doi.org/10.1086/289600
Estrada D (2020) Human supremacy as posthuman risk. J Sociotechn Crit 1(1):1–40. https://doi.org/10.25779/j5ps-dy87
Floridi L (1999) Information ethics: on the theoretical foundations of computer ethics. Ethics Inform Technol 1(1), 37–56. Reprinted, with some modifications, in The Ethicomp J, 1(1) 2004, http://www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk/journal/articles/floridi_l_philosophical.pdf
Floridi L (2009) Against digital ontology. 168(1), 151–178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-008-9334-6
Floridi L (2014) The fourth revolution—how the infosphere is reshaping human reality. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Floridi L (2017) The logic of design as a conceptual logic of information. Mind Mach 27:495–519. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-017-9438-1
Floridi L, Taddeo M (2018) Romans would have denied robots legal personhood. Nature 557:309–309. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05154-5
Fowler C (2018) Relational personhood revisited. Camb Archaeol J 26(3):397–412
Gellers JC (2021) Rights for robots: artificial intelligence, animal and environmental law. Routledge, London
George A, Ravindran S (2010) Protein templates in hard tissue engineering. Nano Today 5(4):254–266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nantod.2010.05.005
Gillings MR, Hilbert M, Kemp DJ (2016) Information in the biosphere: biological and digital worlds. Trends Ecol Evol 31(3):180–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2015.12.013
Grear A (2015) Deconstructing anthropos: a critical legal reflection on ‘anthropocentric’ law and anthropocene ‘humanity.’ Law Crit 26(3):225–249
Guice J (1999) Designing the future: the culture of new trends in science and technology. Res Policy 28(1):81–98
Gunkel DJ (2012) The machine question: critical perspectives on AI. Robot Ethics. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8975.001.0001
Gunkel DJ (2018) The other question: can and should robots have rights? Ethics Inf Technol 20:87–99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-017-9442-4
Güntürkün O, Bugnyar T (2016) Cognition without Cortex. Trends Cogn Sci 20(4):291–303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.02.001
Haff P (2014) Technology as a geological phenomenon: Implications for human well-being. Geol Soc Lond Spec Publ 395:301–309. https://doi.org/10.1144/SP395.4
Hall BK (1999) The paradoxical platypus. Bioscience 49(3):211–218. https://doi.org/10.2307/1313511
Haraway DJ (2008a) When species meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Haraway D (2008b) The companion species manifesto. In: Haraway D (ed) Manifestly haraway. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, pp 91–198
Haraway DJ (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham
Jablonka E, Lamb MJ (2006) The evolution of information in the major transitions. 239(2):236–246 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2005.08.038
Jacob F (1973) The logic of Life. Translated by Betty Spillman. Pantheon, New York
Jacobson H (1955) Information, reproduction and the origin of life. Am Sci 43(1):119–127. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27826595
Jansen P, Stearns B, Rowena R, David W, Philp B, Alice F, Ning W (2018) “State-of-the-Art Review.” Draft of the D4.1 deliverable submitted to the European Commission on April 13, 2018. A report for The SIENNA Project, an EU H2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 741716
Jianyin S (2018) Antinomies of culture and critique of modernity: evaluating György Márkus’s theory of culture from the perspective of China. Thesis Eleven 144(1):3–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513618755774
Jones RA (2013) Relationalism through social robotics. J Theory Soc Behav 43(4):405–424
Kaewunruen S, Ngamkhanong C, Xu S (2020) Large amplitude vibrations of imperfect spider web structures. Sci Rep 10:19161. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-76269-x
Kendig C, Witteveen J (2020) The history and philosophy of taxonomy as an information science. Hist Philos Life Sci 42(3):1–9
Kohn E (2013) How forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. University of California Press, Berkeley
Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2021) Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms. Proc Natl Acad Sci 118(49):e2112672118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112672118
Levin M (2022) Technological approach to mind everywhere: an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds [hypothesis and theory]. Front Syst Neurosci 16
Li A, Zhang W, Ghaffarivardavagh R et al (2016) Towards uniformly oriented diatom frustule monolayers: experimental and theoretical analyses. Microsyst Nanoeng 2:16064. https://doi.org/10.1038/micronano.2016.64
Lichtenegger HC, Schöberl T, Bartl MH, Waite H, Stucky GD (2002) High abrasion resistance with sparse mineralization: copper biomineral in worm jaws. Science 298(5592):389–392. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1075433
Lior A (2020) AI entities as AI Agents: artificial intelligence liability and the AI Respondeat superior analogy. Mitchell Hamline Law Rev 46(5):Article 2. Available at: https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/mhlr/vol46/iss5/2
Marx L (2010) Technology: the emergence of a hazardous concept. Technol Cult 51:561–577
Maximino C, Silva RXDC, da Silva SDNS, Rodrigues LDSDS, Barbosa H, de Carvalho TS, Herculano AM (2015) Non-mammalian models in behavioral neuroscience: consequences for biological psychiatry. Front Behav Neurosci 9:233–233. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00233
McShane K (2014) Individualist biocentrism vs holism revisited. Les Ateliers De l’éthique/The Ethics Forum 9(2):130–148. https://doi.org/10.7202/1026682ar
Miller GA (1983) Informavores. In: Machlup F, Mansfield U (eds) The study of information: interdisciplinary messages, Wiley-Interscience, pp. 111–113, ISBN 0-471-88717-X
Mills CW (2011) The political economy of personhood. On the Human, National Humanities Center. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-thehuman/2011/04/political-economy-of-personhood/
Nussbaum MC (1998) Cultivating humanity. Harvard University Press
Nussbaum MC (2010) Not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities (vol 2). Princeton University Press
Parviainen J (2016) Quantified bodies in the checking loop: analyzing the choreographies of biomonitoring and generating big data. Hum Technol 12(1):56–73. https://doi.org/10.17011/ht/urn.201605192620
Peters JD (1988) Information: notes toward a critical history. J Commun Inq 12(2):9–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/019685998801200202
Peters MA, Jandrić P, McLaren P (2020) Viral modernity? Epidemics, infodemics, and the ‘bioinformational’ paradigm. Educ Philos Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1744226
Politi Y, Metzler Rebecca A, Abrecht M, Gilbert B, Wilt Fred H, Sagi I, Gilbert PUPA (2008) Transformation mechanism of amorphous calcium carbonate into calcite in the sea urchin larval spicule. Proc Natl Acad Sci 105(45):17362–17366. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0806604105
Prabhakar B, Dektar KN, Gordon DM (2012) The regulation of ant colony foraging activity without spatial information. PLoS Comput Biol 8(8):e1002670. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002670
Prasad Shastri V (2015) Biomineralization: a confluence of materials science, biophysics, proteomics, and evolutionary biology. MRS Bull 40(6):473–477. https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2015.118
Quispe-Huamanquispe DG, Gheysen G, Kreuze JF (2017) Horizontal gene transfer contributes to plant evolution: the case of agrobacterium T-DNAs [Mini Review]. Front Plant Sci 8
Römer L, Scheibel T (2008) The elaborate structure of spider silk: structure and function of a natural high performance fiber. Prion 2(4):154–161. https://doi.org/10.4161/pri.2.4.7490
Sahib MA, Abdulnabi AR, Mohammed MA (2018) Improving bacterial foraging algorithm using non-uniform elimination-dispersal probability distribution. Alex Eng J 57(4):3341–3349. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aej.2017.12.010
Salwiczek LH, Emery NJ, Schlinger B, Clayton NS (2009) The development of caching and object permanence in Western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica): which emerges first? J Comp Psychol 123(3):295–303. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016303
Santana C (2018) Biodiversity is a chimera, and chimeras aren’t real. Biol Philos 33(1):15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9626-2
Schatzberg E (2018) Technology: critical history of a concept. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London
Shaviro S (2011) The universe of things. Theory Event. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2011.0027
Stibbe A (2015) Ecolinguistics: language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge and Taylor & Francis, London, New York
Suzman J (2021) Work: a deep history, from the stone age to the age of robots. Penguin Press, New York
Taylor KA (2019) Meaning diminished: toward metaphysically modest semantics. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Veblen T (1914) The instinct of workmanship and the state of the industrial arts. The Macmillan Company, New York
Venturi M (2014) Iodine, PUFAs and iodolipids in health and diseases: an evolutionary perspective
Vigh B, Manzano MJ, Zádori A, Frank CL, Lukáts A, Röhlich P, Szél A, Dávid C (2002) Nonvisual photoreceptors of the deep brain, pineal organs and retina. Histol Histopathol 17(2):555–590. https://doi.org/10.14670/HH-17.555
Vigliocco G, Perniss P, Vinson D (2014) Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution. Philos Trans R Soc Lond Ser B, Biol Sci 369(1651):20130292–20130292. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0292
von Neumann J (1966) Theory of self-reproducing automata. Burks AW (ed). University of Illinois Press, Urbana
Williams R (1983) Culture and society: a vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press, USA
Winograd T (1995) Thinking machines: can there be? Are we? Informatica (Slovenia) 19
Wittgenstein L, Anscombe GEM (1997) Philosophical investigations. Blackwell, Oxford
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gautam, R.D., Devarakonda, B. Towards a bioinformational understanding of AI. AI & Soc 39, 491–513 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01529-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01529-5