Memory as tyranny: A dataist argument for posthuman interconnectivity in Humans and Real Humans

Abstract

Android fiction has connected memory to personhood in a variety of ways. The Swedish TV series Real Humans (2012–2014) and its British remake Humans (2015–2018) argue that lived experience is insufficient for making memories authentic. If experiences are to be more than data, they must be imprinted with affect or another subjectivizing force. For the humanoid robots themselves, such memories do not anchor their identity in the past, but in the evolutionary potential of their future. The present-day narratives of these series thus function as pre-memories both for androids that must unite around a creative imaginary, and for viewers who are encouraged to prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s new master-narrative, something akin to Yuval Harari’s dataism, an intersubjective posthumanist creed. Freed from the tyranny of prosthetic and inauthentic memories, the androids join a super-intelligence that offers dataist universal interconnectivity, which is portrayed as a benevolent break with humanism.