Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

The future of artificial intelligence, posthumanism and the inflection of Pixley Isaka Seme’s African humanism

  • Original Article
  • Published:
AI & SOCIETY Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Increasingly, innovation in artificial intelligence technologies portends the re-conceptualization of human existentiality along the paradigm of posthumanism. An exposition of this through a critical culturo-historical methodology uncloaks the Eurocentric genitive basis of the philosophical anthropology that underpins this technological posthumanism, as well as its dystopian possibilities. As a contribution to obviating the latter, an Africanist civilizational humanism proclaimed by Pixley ka Isaka Seme is proffered as a plausible alternative paradigm for humanity’s technological advancement. Seme, a pan-Africanist thinker of the early twentieth century, proclaimed humanistic-spirituality as the indispensable gift African Civilisation-in-its-renaissance is yet to offer global humanity. His postulation is being provided as a contribution to the archive on cross-cultural ethics of artificial intelligence.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. I employ the term “episteme” to denote the symbiotic and simultaneous relationship between the ethical, the epistemological and the cultural; that, an epistemological framework is inherently laced with a value judgment and that these manifest as culturo-intellectual practices.

  2. Artificial intelligence (AI) is here understood as a new paradigm and practice in technical science dating from the late 1950s that studies and develops theory, methods and application systems used to simulate and extend human patterns of cognition on to machines and related technology platforms.

  3. See for, e.g., Future of Life Institute. An open letter—research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence, January 2015. URL https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/

  4. Existence, as a function of subjectivity, is ascribed exclusively to humans as the sum of self-consciousness. Other possible forms of existence, say as a cyborg, is granted as onto-existential.

  5. Julian Huxley, a distinguished biologist credited with coining the term “transhumanism” wrote in Religion Without Revelation (1927), “The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way – but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve, man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” (quoted in Bostrom 2005, 7, own emphasis).

  6. That is, “the fulfilled Promise”, given our working understanding of posthumanism as being a belief system, a philosophical rationalisation directed to the service of the technologized humans, and a multi-species de-anthropocentric “society”.

  7. A more later work with a direct philosophical articulation of the sentiment expressed by Sloan is (Stiegler 2011).

  8. http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/pixley_ka_isakka_seme.html (accessed 2019–10-23).

  9. See Seme “Native Union” article in Imvo Zabantsundu, October 24, 1911 (in Karis & Carter 1972, p.72).

  10. Other biographical writings on Seme are (Rive and Couzens 1993); (Mashamaite 2011); (Karis and Carter 1977).

  11. For a record Seme’s formation of the Native Farmers’ Association in 1912 with its land buying programme, and his vision of black economic upliftment during his Presidency of the ANC in the 1930s (see Ngqulunga 2017, pp. 129–150, 178, 189–90).

  12. It is instructive that Heidegger wrote this essay, purportedly in response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is Humanism” (1945), 2 years after the vanquishing of Nazi Germany, with whose ideology he had sympathised. By this time, the newly established United Nations with its Universal Declaration on Human Rights had seized the discourse on the uniqueness of human dignity and life.

  13. For a posthumanistic variation to this, see Olivier (2018).

  14. Time Magazine, February 21, 2011, http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16,641,20,110,221,00.html Accessed 20 November 2019.

  15. Smarter Mobility Conference 2019, Pretoria, South Africa, 2 October 2019 https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/auto-industry-faces-major-paradigm-shift-warns-toyota-sa-boss-2019-10-04

  16. Incidentally, during October 2019 Toyota unveiled an on-board vehicle control system which is designed to perform on a bond developed between the AI suite and the emotions and biological state of the driver. Named “Yui”, this AI suite delivers a personalised experience based on its monitoring of a driver's emotional state and alertness. The AI can engage with the driver using interactive voice communication, in-seat functions designed to increase alertness or reduce stress, fragrances and other human–machine interactions. https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/life/motoring/2019-10-17-meet-toyotas-onboard-buddy/ Accessed 17 October 2019.

  17. See, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2,048,299,00.html Accessed 20 October 2019.

  18. Quoted in Michael Woronko “Exploring the philosophical implications of our imminent clash with AI.” https,//medium.com/predict/artificial-intelligence-crossroads-c1dfc0cc29af Accessed 17 March 2019.

  19. See https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/basic/5thbasicplan.pdf.

  20. See www.neuralink.com.

References

  • Biko S (2004a) Some African cultural concepts. In: Stubbs A (ed) I write what I like. Picador, Johannesburg, pp 44–51 ((Orig. 1971))

    Google Scholar 

  • Biko S (2004b) Black consciousness and the quest for a true humanity. In: Stubbs A (ed) I write what I like. Picador, Johannesburg, pp 96–108 ((Orig. 1971))

    Google Scholar 

  • Bostrom N (1998) How long before superintelligence? International Journal of Futures Studies 2, https://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html. Accessed 30 June 2020

  • Bostrom (2005) A history of transhumanist thought. J Evol Technol 14(1):1–25

    Google Scholar 

  • Bostrom N (2014) Superintelligence, paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Braidotti R (2013) The posthuman. Polity Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark A, Chalmers D (1998) The Extended Mind. Analysis 58(1):7–19

    Google Scholar 

  • Crowder M (1963) The first international congress of Africanists. J Mod Afr Stud 1(2):250–252

    Google Scholar 

  • Fanon F (1991) The wretched of the earth. Grove Weidenfeld, New York ((Orig. 1962))

    Google Scholar 

  • Fara P (2009) Science, a four thousand year history. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Ferrando F (2019) Philosophical posthumanism. Bloomsbury, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Floridi L (ed) (2015) The onlife manifesto, being human in a hyper connected era. Springer, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Frischmann B, Selinger E (2018) Re-Engineering Humanity. Cambridge University, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Geiss I (1974) The Pan-African movement. Methuen, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Gladden ME (2018) Sapient circuits and digitalized flesh, the organization as locus of technological posthumanization. Defragmenter Media, Indianapolis

    Google Scholar 

  • Gladden M E (2019) Who will be the members of Society 5.0? Towards an Anthropology of Technologically posthumanized future societies. Social Science 8 (148), www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8050148. Accessed 31 January 2020

  • Government of Japan, 2016. The 5th science and technology basic plan, https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/basic/5thbasicplan.pdf Accessed 24 November 2019

  • Hariri YN (2011) Sapiens, a brief history of humankind. Vintage, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Hayles NK (1999) How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger M (1962) Being and time. (Tr., Macquarie J, Robinson E), 7th edn. Oxford, Blackwell ((Orig. 1927))

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger (1985) Letter on humanism. In: Cahoone L (ed) From modernism to post modernism, 1st edn. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 274–308 ((Orig. 1947))

    Google Scholar 

  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2017) Ethically-aligned design, a vision for prioritizing human well-being with autonomous and intelligent systems, Ver. 2. IEEE, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Karis T, Carter GM (eds) (1972) From protest to challenge, a documentary history of African politics in South Africa 1882–1964, vol 1. Stanford University, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Kurzweil R (1999) The age of spiritual machines, when computers exceed human intelligence. Viking, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Lamola MJ (2021) Africa in the fourth industrial revolution: a status quaestionis, from the cultural to the phenomenological. In: Okyere-Manu BD (ed) African values, ethics and technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70550-3 (Chapter 3)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Lyotard J-F (1984) The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge (Tr. Bennington G, Massumi B). Manchester University Press, Manchester

    Google Scholar 

  • Mashamaite M (2011) The second coming: the life and times of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the founder of the ANC. Chatworld, Pretoria

    Google Scholar 

  • Matalino B (2015) A response to metz’s reply on the end of ubuntu. S Afr J Philos 34(2):214–225

    Google Scholar 

  • Mbembe A (2017) Critique of black reason (Tr. Dubois L). Wits University Press, Johannesburg

    Google Scholar 

  • Mhlambi S (2020) From rationality to relationality: Ubuntu as an ethical human rights framework for artificial intelligence governance, carr center discussion paper 2002–009. Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Moravec H (1999) Robot, mere machine to transcendent mind. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Müller VC (ed) (2014) Fundamental issues of artificial intelligence. Springer, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  • Naude W, Dimitri N (2020) The race for an artificial general intelligence: implications for public Policy. AI Soc 35:367–379

    Google Scholar 

  • Ndlovu M (2014) Cosmopolitanism and the Seeds of Nationalism, the making of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a Zulu intellectual leader of the early twentieth century. Master of Science in African Studies, University of Oxford, Dissert

    Google Scholar 

  • Ngqulunga B (2017) The man who founded the ANC: a biography of Pixley ka Isaka Seme. Penguin, Cape Town

    Google Scholar 

  • Olivier A (2018) On the nature of language, Heidegger and African philosophy. S Afr J Philos 27(4):310–323

    Google Scholar 

  • Parens E (1998) Enhancing human traits, ethical and social implications. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC

    Google Scholar 

  • Peters MA, Jandric P (2015) Philosophy of education in the age of digital reason. Rev Contemp Philos 14:162–181

    Google Scholar 

  • Rae G (2014) Heidegger’s influence on posthumanism: the destruction of metaphysics, technology and the overcoming of anthropocentrism. Hist Hum Sci 27(1):51–69

    Google Scholar 

  • Ramose M (1999) African philosophy through Ubuntu. Mond Books, Harare

    Google Scholar 

  • Rive R, Couzens T (1993) Seme, the founder of the ANC. Africa World Press, Trenton N.J

    Google Scholar 

  • Robertson J (2017) Robo sapiens japanicus, robots, gender, family, and the Japanese nation. University of California Press, Oakland CA

    Google Scholar 

  • Royakkers LJ, Timmer J, Kool L, van Est R (2018) Societal and ethical issues of digitization. Ethics Inf Technol 20(2):127–142

    Google Scholar 

  • Russell S, Norvig P (2009) Artificial intelligence: modern approach, 3rd edn. Pearson, Essex

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Schwab K (2015) The fourth industrial revolution: what it means and how to respond. Snapshot, December 12, 2015, http://www.hsrc.ac.za/uploads/pageContent/9352. Accessed 16 June 2020

  • Schwab K (2016) The fourth industrial revolution. World Economic Forum, Geneva

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwab K (2018) Shaping the future of the fourth industrial revolution. Penguin, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Seme P (1972) The regeneration of Africa. In: Karis T, Carter G (eds) From protest to challenge, a documentary history of African politics in South Africa 1882–164, vol 1. Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp 69–73 (Orig. 1906)

    Google Scholar 

  • Sen S, Shovan M, Debayan SD (2020) The body is the network. IEEE Spectrum, December 2020, pp 45–49. https://doi.org/10.1109/mspec.2020.9271808. http://dilu.no-ip.info/downloads/12_Spectrum_2020.pdf. Accessed 15 Mar 2021

  • Sloan T (1996) Damaged life, the crisis of the modern psyche. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Spahn A (2012) And lead us (not) into persuasion? Persuasive technology and the ethics of communication. Sci Eng Ethics 18(4):1–18

    Google Scholar 

  • Stiegler B (2011) The decadence of industrial democracies: disbelief and discredit (Tr. Ross D). Polity Press, Cambridge (Orig. 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  • Tegmark M (2017) Life 3.0, being human in an age of artificial intelligence. Alfred A. Knoff, New York.

  • Vance A (2015) Elon Musk: how the billion CEO of Tesla is shaping our future. Virgin Books, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Vinge V (1993) The coming technological singularity, how to survive in the posthuman era. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19940022856.pdf. Accessed 17 May 2020.

  • Webster F (1995) Theories of the information society. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolfe C (2010) What is posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhao S, Moritz S and Seal T (2021) Forget 5G, the US and China Are already fighting for 6G dominance. Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-08/forget-5g-the-u-s-and-china-are-already-fighting-for-6g-dominance. Accessed 15 March 2021

  • Zuboff S (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books, London

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Funding

Research for this paper was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa, Grant 129124.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Malesela John Lamola.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lamola, M.J. The future of artificial intelligence, posthumanism and the inflection of Pixley Isaka Seme’s African humanism. AI & Soc 37, 131–141 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01191-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01191-3

Keywords

Navigation