What is Essential to Being Human?

This book asks whether there exists an essence exclusive to human beings that serves to distinguish them from artificially intelligent robots, and considers the extent to which human essentialism might justify the denial to advanced AI robots of legal and citizenship rights.

Auteur

Margaret S. Archer founded the Centre for Social Ontology in 2013 (now based at the École de Management, Université de Grenoble) when she was Professor of Social Theory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Her books include Social Origins of Educational Systems; Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory; Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach; Being Human: The Problem of Agency; Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Making our Way Through the World; The Reflexive Imperative; Late Modernity: Trajectories Towards Morphogenic Society; Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order; Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity; and Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing. Andrea M. Maccarini is Professor of Sociology and Associate Chair in the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padua, Italy. He is also a member of the teaching board of the Ph.D. programme in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Bologna, Italy, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Boston University and the Humboldt-Universität Berlin, among others. He is a board member of IACR (International Association for Critical Realism) and collaborator of the Centre for Social Ontology, founded by Margaret S. Archer. His current research interests lie in the fields of social theory, education and socialiaation, and cultural change. He is the author of Deep Change and Emergent Structures in Global Society: Explorations in Social Morphogenesis and the co-editor of Engaging with the World: Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations.

Contenu

1. Introduction Margaret S. Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini
   2. On Robophilia and Robophobia Douglas V. Porpora
   3. Sapience and Sentience: A Reply to Porpora Margaret S. Archer
   4. Relational Essentialism Pierpaolo Donati
   5. Artificial Intelligence: Sounds like a friend, looks like a friend, is it a friend? Jamie Morgan
   6. Growing Up in a World of Platforms: What Changes and What Doesn't? Mark Carrigan
   7. On Macropolitics of Knowledge for Collective Learning in the Age of AI-Boosted

Big Relational Tech * Emmanuel Lazega and Jaime Montes-Lihn

• 8. Can AIs do Politics? * Gazi Islam
• 9. Inhuman Enhancements? When Human Enhancements Alienate from Self, Others, Society and Nature * Ismael Al-Amoudi
• 10. The Social Meanings of Perfection: Human Self-Understanding in a Post-Human Society Andrea M. Maccarini