Posthumanism and Artificial Intelligence (AI): The Role of Human Agency and AI in Shaping a Terraformed Planet in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time
TL;DR
The study focuses not on Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of otherness but on the specific role of AI, spurred by human agency, as an autonomous mediator that actively disrupts and destabilises anthropocentric hierarchies, and reconstructs a digital alternative through protagonist's metamorphosis from a physical being into a digital consciousness.
Abstract
Posthumanism is a conceptual framework to question the idea that humans are the centre of the universe. In the huge development of science and technology, humans no longer maintain an anthropocentric hegemony and control. Instead of seeing humans as superior and independent, posthumanism sees humans as a part of much bigger network. This paper explores the influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the establishment of high civilisation upon a terraformed planet by critically analysing Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, an AI fiction. The novel centres on the accidental birth of a self-aware spider colony, as brought about in Dr. Avrana Kern’s AI-guided mission. It extensively delves into AI, evolutionary biology and sociological and sociopolitical dimensions. This paper shows how AI and technology intersect in the post-Earth, terraforming environment. Adopting concepts of Braidotti (2019) and Haraway and Begelke (2003), the study examines how Kern’s technological ambition shapes the new civilisation with the evolution of the planet’s occupants, including both human and non-human intelligences, to see how Children of Time portrays technology as a driving factor in the development of new kinds of awareness, society, and government, and how scientific desire can transcend human limits. The study focuses not on Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of otherness but on the specific role of AI, spurred by human agency, as an autonomous mediator that actively disrupts and destabilises anthropocentric hierarchies, and reconstructs a digital alternative through protagonist’s metamorphosis from a physical being into a digital consciousness. It therefore bridges the gap between literary analysis and philosophical posthumanism and provides a new framework of assessing non-human agency in contemporary sci-fi.