Shifting the Goalposts: Reconceptualizing Robots, AI, and Humans

The rapid advancement of AI and autonomous systems is posing some difficult challenges to human beings, and not merely because they can now beat us at our favourite strategy games, like chess and Go, at which we used to assume that humans were invincible. AI and robots also pose challenges to humans’ conceptions of ourselves, not just as the “rational animal,” but increasingly in other areas that we used to consider our exclusive domain, pushing humans’ self-conception into more niche, ever-dwindling areas. The abilities of autonomous systems has created, therefore, crises in our understanding of what it means to be “human,” but these crises can be productively directed to challenge the founding mythologies of humanism, forcing us to think re-think what it means to be post-human, and overcoming the idea that “humans” and “machines” are clearly demarcated and in competition with one another.