Posthumanist ASI

As artificial intelligence moves from narrow to general to superintelligence, is humanity witnessing a technological evolution — or projecting its own philosophical transformation onto machines?

A familiar classification runs through the literature on artificial intelligence: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). This long-anticipated yet repeatedly postponed progression (still at the ANI stage after seventy-five years) is commonly imagined as a scale of increasing capability. But the same three stages evoke another philosophical sequence: Humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism. Do these two sequences genuinely correspond? Or, in trying to understand artificial intelligence, is humanity merely projecting its own image onto it?

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) refers to AI systems designed to perform specific tasks. They play chess, generate text, and recognize images. Yet each remains confined to the tasks it was designed to perform. In this sense, ANI belongs within the classical humanist worldview. In humanism, the human is the subject and technology is the instrument. The machine extends human agency. The distinction between instrument and agent is clear: Human acts; technology serves! ANI operates within precisely this logic. However complex its decision-making processes may become, ANI remains ontologically an instrument. (Many…