What is Essential to Being Human?

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.

1. Introduction 2. On Robophilia and Robophobia 3. Sapience and Sentience: A Reply to Porpora 4. Relational Essentialism 5. Artificial Intelligence: Sounds like a friend, looks like a friend, is it a friend? 6. Growing Up in a World of Platforms: What Changes and What Doesn’t? 7. On Macropolitics of Knowledge for Collective Learning in the Age of AI-Boosted Big Relational Tech 8. Can AIs do Politics? 9. Inhuman Enhancements? When Human Enhancements Alienate from Self, Others, Society and Nature 10. The Social Meanings of Perfection: Human Self-Understanding in a Post-Human Society