포스트휴먼으로 가는 길: 인간과 기계의 공(共)진화를 중심으로

Abstract

This essay illuminates a recent trend of what has been called the posthuman, or posthumanism to explore the possibility of coevolution of human and machine. Since science and technology have brought almost unprecedented achievements to human society for the last few decades, there have been a number of efforts to reconsider the knowledge and beliefs we have maintained about humanity. The posthuman refers to re-creating the human after the long-established humanism, while posthumanism comprises the attempts to define the changes of humanity that cannot be explained with previous criteria, and to radically reorient a relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Articulating at first the theoretical issues and characteristics of posthumanism through the comparison of transhumanism and critical posthumanism, this study explores a possible way to the posthuman via human-machine coevolution in which humans and robots coexist and influence one another. The essay then offers a comparative reading of two classical examples, Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” and Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?