Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and The Posthuman in Contemporary English Literature: Personhood, Care, and Embodiment in Machines Like Me, Frankissstein, and Klara and The Sun

Abstract

Contemporary fiction has anticipated many of the ethical questions that accompany artificial intelligence: what counts as a person, whether intelligence entails moral standing, how embodiment shapes identity, and what obligations arise when care is mediated by machines. This article offers a comparative close reading of Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) through the posthuman theories of Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway. Rather than treating artificial beings as technologically autonomous threats, the analysis asks how their relationships with humans expose existing structures of ownership, gendered em-bodiment, labour, and moral exclusion. Adam’s presence in Machines Like Me unsettles the distinction be-tween property and person; Frankissstein contrasts Ry Shelley’s technologically mediated embodiment with Victor Stein’s desire to transcend the body; and Klara and the Sun presents care as both an intimate relation and a commodified service. Across the three novels, personhood emerges not as a consequence of biological origin alone but as a question of agency, vulnerability, relationality, and recognition. The article argues that posthuman fiction is especially valuable for literary ethics because it shifts attention from the speculative question of whether machines will become human to the more immediate question of how humans construct, use, value, and discard nonhuman others.