Jenna Sutela Stuff

We are basically a collection of bacteria, acting as carriers of bacteria and systems that allow communication between bacteria. The language that we speak is probably not the most efficient way of communicating among bacteria — it’s about being aware of “noise” in a system — whether that’s Martians, or whatever other lifeforms we encounter in space, or other DNA-filled systems. There’s this “noise” that exists, there’s a form of communication that’s happening there, a collective intelligence that exists in the body without language. An individual has this capacity for this living and growing intelligence: this ‘bacterial’ or ‘prokaryotic’ consciousness.

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I’m interested in what the machine can do with nonhuman data: languages that we don’t understand like those of bacteria or Martians. The origins of deep learning and machine learning, for example, are not necessarily from a human perspective. So I wonder if there are other ways of approaching AI — perhaps not as a replacement for things that we do or are trying to recreate ourselves, but to open up new sets of problems that we haven’t seen before.

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“I’m interested in the idea of the gut-brain connection and the fact that we consist of more bacteria than so-called human cells,” shares Sutela. “This sort of multiplicity or idea that we’ve never been fully human to begin with was really interesting to me, but also this widening or opening aspect to that.” With Bacillus subtilis — which is believed to survive life on Mars as happily as it hangs out in our gastrointestinal tract, and could well originate from other planets

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Human genomes are only found in around ten percent of all cells in the human body; the rest comprises of bacteria, fungi, and other protozoists. Bacteria were the first to breathe air and to swim; through fermentation and other macroscopic processes, they perform the backstage metabolic acts that sustain all forms of life; they carry with them traces of material histories of the Earth and quite possibly other planets.