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HUMAN AFTER ALL, Human — After what, again?

By Chrethuma of Cherthmalau · HT

HUMAN AFTER ALL begins with a question that seems to concern artificial intelligence: what remains of the human when machines can perform many of the functions through which we have learned to recognize ourselves? The book gradually moves this question elsewhere. It examines the human tendency to define itself through functions, properties, capacities, boundaries, and forms of exclusivity. When machines enter spaces once associated with intelligence, creativity, language, reasoning, and production, the central question is no longer simply what machines can do. It becomes: why did we need certain abilities to remain exclusively ours in order to recognize ourselves? From this point, the inquiry moves toward the conditions that precede choice. Before we choose, something has already appeared as possible—or remained outside our field of attention. Our representations do not merely describe the world; they participate in shaping what becomes visible, comparable, and actionable. Delegation therefore becomes more than the transfer of a task: it can transform the capacities and conditions through which future choices remain possible. The book then explores reversibility, asking whether a civilization can transform itself without eliminating its ability to intervene again in what it has become. This leads toward the living—not as a final territory that machines must be unable to enter, but as an existence engaged in continuation, relation, transformation, encounter, and becoming. HUMAN AFTER ALL ultimately refuses to replace one definitive definition of the human with another. It does not seek a final boundary between human and machine. Instead, it asks what becomes possible when humanity no longer needs to remain at the centre, nor to prove its value through exclusive capacities. The question therefore changes. It is no longer only: What will remain of the human after the machine? It becomes: What can still appear? The human, in this book, is not presented as a finished answer, but as an existence capable of responding to what it encounters, transforming its conditions, and continuing to become.

Category

WRITING

Approved

17 September 2026