Toward a dataist future: tracing Scandinavian posthumanism in Real Humans

Abstract

AbstractArtificial intelligence is likely to undermine the anthropocentrism of humanism, the master narrative that undergirds the modern world. Humanity will need a new story to structure our beliefs and cooperation around. As different regions explore posthumanist alternatives through fiction, they bring with them distinct traditions of thought. The Swedish TV series Real Humans (2012–2014) and its British remake, Humans (2015–2018), dramatize the challenge of freeing oneself from cultural presumptions. When negotiating personhood with humanoid robots, the Swedish protagonist family presupposes a social-democratic ethos, which is a trace of Scandinavian humanism that carries into the family’s posthumanist beliefs. Using Heideggerian and related perspectives, I analyze these series to make a case for a dataist ontology with potential to re-enchant the modern world and bring forth a new epoch of being. Such a master narrative of algorithmic universality could be facilitated by a new level of interconnectedness made possible by AI. This ontology fulfills the requirements of Robbins and Horta (Introduction, Cosmopolitanisms. New York University Press, New York, pp 1–17, 2017) who call for a cosmopolitanism of inclusivity with room for overlapping conceptions to remedy our present era’s international dysfunction. The Swedish and British TV series suggest that even if humanity’s uniting around a dataist master narrative were to be driven by intercultural competition, the decisive choice might be out of human hands. Paradoxically, such disempowering in terms of agency is portrayed as necessary for human re-enchantment.