Beyond Humanity: AI, Posthumanism, and the Future of Human Existence

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20208628

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and posthumanism in literature, examining how AI narratives redefine what it means to be human. By analyzing key texts such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the study demonstrates how AI functions as a posthuman agent that destabilizes traditional humanist conceptions of consciousness, morality, and identity. The paper argues that AI challenges human exceptionalism by exhibiting intelligence, empathy, ethical reasoning, and creativity, while also fostering human-machine hybridity through relational and technological entanglements. Furthermore, it investigates the ethical and philosophical implications of AI, highlighting the need for expanded moral frameworks that recognize non-human agency and relational interdependence. Ultimately, the paper contends that literary representations of AI encourage a rethinking of identity and consciousness as distributed, emergent, and relational phenomena, thereby redefining humanity in a technologically mediated, posthuman world.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Posthumanism, Human Exceptionalism, Human-Machine, Hybridity, Consciousness, Identity, Ethics, Relational Agency, Speculative Fiction, Literary AI.