Short Abstract

This panel asks how anthropology can address the ethical, epistemological and political challenges posed by the development of complex intelligent systems that blur the boundaries between human and machine, organic and non-organic, and living and non-living beings.

Long Abstract

What does it mean to be intelligent, sentient, or self-aware in an age when machines speak, algorithms predict, and humans increasingly rely on artificial cognition to make sense of the world? As the boundaries between human and machine thought blur—and as new developments apply AI to decoding animal communication—anthropology is uniquely positioned to interrogate the moral and epistemic assumptions that have long defined the “human condition.” This panel asks whether we are now entering a transhuman condition: a moment in which intelligence itself becomes distributed, relational, and contested.

While debates in AI ethics and governance tend to treat intelligence as a measurable property, anthropological and STS perspectives reveal it as a cultural and moral construct that legitimises particular hierarchies of life and value. Yet as artificial, organic, and hybrid intelligences increasingly participate in the production of knowledge, new philosophical, legal, and ethical questions arise: who—or what—can be recognised as a thinking subject, a moral agent, or a bearer of rights?

We invite ethnographic and theoretical contributions that explore how intelligence, sentience, and personhood are enacted, contested, or reimagined in laboratories, digital environments, therapeutic settings, and everyday life. Topics may include AI–human interaction and embodiment, the use of AI in studying nonhuman communication, developments in robotics and organic AI, moral and legal recognition of nonhuman beings, or the affective and epistemic dimensions of more-than-human relations.

Bringing together anthropologists and allied scholars, this panel seeks to rethink the category of intelligence—and, with it, the very idea of the human—in light of the social, ethical, and ontological transformations brought about by artificial and nonhuman minds.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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