As artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and digital systems accelerate, it can feel as though our relationship with technology is entirely new. In reality, humans have always lived alongside machines, from eyeglasses and player pianos to computers and algorithms. What has changed is the speed, scale, and power of those tools.
Dr. Vanessa Chang explores the ideas behind "The Body Digital," an investigation into how human bodies, senses, and technologies co-evolve. Drawing on history, art, literature, and systems thinking, the conversation challenges the idea that intelligence exists only in machines or abstract cognition. Instead, it argues that intelligence is embodied, social, and shaped by relationships between people and tools.
The discussion examines how technological change has historically been met with fear, optimism, and misunderstanding, and what those patterns can teach us today. It also considers how designing for bodily difference, community, and care can help expand human possibility rather than narrow it. Throughout, a central question guides the conversation: does a technology expand our horizons, or does it quietly contract them?
By looking to the past, Dr. Chang offers a framework for thinking more clearly about how we design, adopt, and live with technologies in the present and future.
