What embodiment means in a world of artificial intelligence

~30 min talk + Q&A

AI can predict, generate language, recognise patterns, and increasingly perform tasks we associate with intelligence.

And neuroscience tells us something strange: in some respects, our own brains work through prediction too. We don't simply perceive the world; we continuously generate predictions and update our prediction models as reality pushes back.

What, then, is actually distinctive about being human?

I want to explore a possible answer through embodiment. Our intelligence doesn't happen in isolation from the body. Attention, mood, cognition, energy and decision-making are continuously informed by signals from inside us: our nervous system, hormones, metabolism, energy availability, physiological state. And unlike an AI system, we don't simply process information about the world. We have to live in it, as bodies, systems within a larger system, with needs and limits: hunger, fatigue, pleasure, stress, vulnerability.

This raises questions I think are particularly interesting for people who build technology: 

What if what we experience as character and personality is, in part, simply the output of a biological machine?

And what happens when the systems we design interact with biological systems we don't fully understand?

Food will be one concrete example, because it's perhaps the most intimate system we interact with: commercial, technological, and cultural, and it literally becomes part of us.

Bio Linda Salamé:

Linda Salamé is a biologist and food engineer, and former policy officer at the European Commission. She is the founder of Body Security, an investigation into the forces that shape human life, starting with the most powerful one: food. She thinks that in a world increasingly run by AI, it's worth remembering that we're running on our own code too.

Linda moves between disciplines (food, biology, policy, technology, and art) drawing connections others don't usually make, in the belief that enriching our thinking matters as much as anything we build. She is currently training as an ethical hacker, which has only sharpened her interest in the systems, technological and biological, that quietly shape human experience.

📍 Online

📅 Thursday, 17 September 2026, 12:00-13:00

🎟️ Free register on our platform: https://platform.clusity.be/c/virtual-coffees-ama-s/ai-has-no-body