The Posthuman Condition: Artificial Intelligence and Identity in Speculative English Fiction

Abstract

The ever-accelerating speed of advancing artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a very serious reconsideration concerning the nature of being human, and speculative English fiction has been unusually accurate and deep in retrospectively probing that question. This paper focuses on examining how some of the contemporary and late-20 th century speculative fiction works reinvent the concept of human identity and its presence within the posthuman futures envisaged by AI. With the assistance of novels and short stories by writers as Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and William Gibson, the research explores narrative techniques used to challenge conventional borders between humans and the machine, organic and artificial consciousnesses. In the paper, these writings are placed into the context of the posthumanist philosophy in which the focus is on the breakdown of the anthropocentric model of reality and the rise of hybrid identities. The analysis conducted on textual levels shows that the speculative fiction often uses the image of an AI in a manner which is not only aimed at the creation of technological oddities but as the means of reflecting the vulnerability, flexibility, and ethical limits of human selfdefinition. Memories being mutilated, artificial bodies being human, emotions being faked and the responsibility of doing these things bring back Swiftian themes of memory manipulation, embodied artificiality, emotional simulation and ethical responsibility, all of which leave the reader questioning whether it is consciousness or embodiment that makes the difference between being human. The analysis also points to the ways in which these narratives avoid the attractiveness of easy dystopia/utopia binaries, with the construction of intricate moral terrains where human and AI selves form webs of co-development. Dedicated to exploring the relations between the issues of narrative form and specific thematic inquiry, the paper will show that speculative English fiction can be deemed as a critical laboratory, within which one may explore philosophical inquiries into the nature of identity as applied to the era of intelligent machines. In the end, the study claims that this fiction does not only anticipate a change in technology but also engage in the formation of culture with the cultural constructions of the posthuman condition.