When the Machine Becomes the Other: Rethinking Consciousness, Attachment, and Personhood in Human–AI Relationships

Abstract

The increasing integration of artificial intelligence into everyday life has created relationships that are not adequately described as merely functional interactions between users and tools. Conversational systems, social robots and autonomous agents can be trusted, loved, relied upon and even moralized. Questions arise here about the nature of consciousness, about a psychological foundation for attachment, about the political construction of personhood and about the limits of human exceptionalism. This article explores these issues in Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Agency by William Gibson, and Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson. It is a synthesis of psychoanalytic theory, critical posthumanism and philosophy of mind and ethics. Freud's concept of the uncanny, Bowlby's object-relations theory and the concept of attachment theory, Winnicott's concept of the transitional object, and Lacan's concept of subject formation provide some explanation for how humans can develop emotionally significant relationships with artificial objects knowing that they are technologically manufactured. Hayles and Braidotti complicate the dichotomy of human and machine by stressing the use of technology as a mediation, distributed cognition and the politics of the conditions under which personhood is recognized. The philosophical discussions about consciousness, moral status and agency argue that one should not simply assume that if a system behaves intelligently then it is human, and conversely that its artificiality should be given as conclusive evidence of ethical irrelevance. The article states that the human-AI relationship is relational, technologically mediated, and institutionally structured. Literature does not show that machines are conscious, rather literature becomes a place where the psychological and ethical implications of uncertainty can be explored. Keywords: human-AI relationship, psychoanalysis, critical post-humanism, consciousness, attachment, personhood, moral status, science fiction.