Posthuman cognitive ecologies and AI moral agency in aAnn Leckie’s Ancillary Justice

• Autores: Ruxandra Teodorescu
• Localización: The posthuman condition in 21st century literature and culture: interdisciplinary Insights / María Ferrández Sanmiguel (ed. lit.), Esther Muñoz González (ed. lit.), Carmen Laguarta Bueno (ed. lit.), 2025, ISBN 978-3-031-83701-2, págs. 49-66
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Artificially intelligent characters are not only well-established in speculative fiction but have also become influential figures in investigations into the posthuman condition. While posthuman ideals inform debates about AI moral participation, contemporary literary AI narratives provide a platform for philosophical thought experiments to develop and expand. To this end, this chapter investigates recent approaches to the posthuman as well as interrogations of AI moral agency in connection to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) to show how moral attributions can no longer be solely determined by humanistic standards such as the elusive human consciousness. Thus, Katherine Hayles’ Unthought (2017), as well as works from the fields of machine and AI ethics are introduced to establish how cognitive technologies perform in planetary cognitive ecologies and are thus able to make decisions with moral and ethical ramifications despite their nonhuman structures. To illustrate the potential of these theories, this chapter investigates how Leckie’s novel cautions against applying humanistic approaches to technological debates, showing how we could wrongfully overlook artificial agency on account of biased indeterminate criteria. Not only does Leckie’s AI question the adaptability and the confines of the human body, but its dispersed cognitive reach also challenges the human/nonhuman binary.