Artificial Form of Life as the Discrimination Challenge for Education: Non-Human Intelligence and Schooling

The paper thematizes contemporary moment of humanity’s self-understanding in the context of advanced technological development, by looking at it through the lens of (un)imaginability of artificial lifeform education. This perspective allows us to thematize the problem of discrimination in both of its meanings – how to distinguish the human form of life from others, in this case artificial forms of life, and how to ensure that this distinction does not serve as a basis for degradation – in order to argue for the suspension of human narcissism and suggest the possibility of their equality in access to education, and not only education. The first part presents the challenges artificial intelligence and especially androids represent to the traditional vision of the human, suggesting a necessity of its renewed examination and rearticulation in the style of critical posthumanism. The middle section differentiates two potential as well as typical reactions to the drama whose protagonists are humans and self-aware human-like robots, both of which arose from a fear of losing a recognizable human identity. It is concluded that, running parallel to changes in thinking humanity and the development of techno-science, there have been changes in approaches to humanity’s artificial Other and the (im)possibility of its education: from a fundamental rejection of such an idea that “soulless machines” might attend school, through a softened stance that autonomous automatons might be capable of learning, to allowing for the possibility that they even join humans in schools.