The Evolution of Humanoid Robots: A Posthuman Reading of the Sci-Fi A. I. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has been the most significant technological advancement recently. By describing intelligence as artificial, this scientific discipline aims at building smart machines that can mimic and compete human intelligence to perform tasks even better than humans. The oxymoronic coinage of the term “artificial intelligence” has prompted the discussion of this research questions related to the problematic future relationship between humans and AI technology, and the future of humanity in the face of the “fittest” evolutionary humanoid robots. The paper elaborates this discussion through analyzing the sci-fi cinematic adaptation, A. I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), directed by Steven Spielberg, which is based on the science-fiction short story, Supertoys Last All Summer Long (1969), by Brian Aldiss. Through a posthuman approach, this paper aims at examining the deconstruction of the essentialist dualism between humans and AI robots through analyzing the blurred distinction between the “self”/human characters and the “other”/AI robot David in the selected work. By that way, this study entails the posthuman non-hierarchal human/AI perspective. In this context, the goal of this paper is to explore the problematic futuristic insight in A. I. Artificial Intelligence that is intertwined with the wider framing of a postapocalyptic future where human beings will be replaced and eliminated by super-evolutionary robotic beings. By deformalizing the present and breaking through its confining realism, the selected science-fiction work explores the deconstruction of “the human” concept as we know it, and the evolution of a new kind of a future existence that is different from ours as ours.