Artificial Humanities: A Literary Perspective on Creating and Enhancing Humans from Pygmalion to Cyborgs

Abstract

This dissertation explores boundaries and relationships between humans and humanlike artificial entities in the twentieth-century and contemporary literature. The central question, What is human?, is posed in relation to the newest and speculated developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, social robotics, neurotechnology, and assisted reproduction technologies including gene editing. I focus on three major and related topics extensively thematized in Western fiction (American, British, Irish), and less so in Eastern European fiction (Czech, Slovenian, and Serbian). Chapters 1 and 2 introduce posthuman language as used by humans, artificial intelligence, and nonhuman animals; chapters 3 and 4 examine pygmalionism and paralysis from medical and social perspectives; and the final two chapters evaluate assisted reproduction in terms of posthumanist biology. The main argument of the dissertation is that although the questions and definitions of the human are, unbeknown to scientists and engineers, now formed and framed in STEM fields, literature suggests solutions to philosophical questions pertaining to new technologies and offers a level of insight inaccessible to quantitative science. The dissertation proposes a new framework of artificial humanities where investigation of philosophical questions pertaining the human, nature, and technology occurs alongside cutting-edge science, technology, and engineering. The theoretical argument proposes that, despite recent claims of ontological posthumanism, scientific evolution still embraces the human and anthropocentrism.