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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how emerging artificial superintelligences reshape human self-consciousness at the scale of the species. It argues that AI intensifies polarisation while reopening questions of universal human values, calling for engaged anthropological interventions in future-making.

Paper long abstract

The digital world has produced a global political landscape wherein intensified interconnectivity coincides with deepening social, moral and political fragmentation. This paper explores this paradox through the emerging presence of advanced artificial superintelligences within human social worlds, asking how such encounters will transform human self-consciousness as a global species. Drawing on cosmopolitan approaches in the anthropology of the future, I examine how AI-driven systems and algorithmic decision-making uncover deep anxieties regarding the loss of human control, agency and autonomy.

Without assuming the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, intimate proximity to higher intelligences will transform our understandings of the human species as a universal community, beyond the imagined borders separating civilizations, nations and regions. A long-term existential risk envisions a collision with hegemonic autonomous agents that are misaligned with what humans value. Implications for such concerns are profoundly anthropological and epistemic, revealing fractures in how humanity conceives of itself as a collective subject.

Responding to debates on polarized futures in a context of moral pluralism, I argue for an engaged anthropology that moves beyond critique to actively intervene in the shaping of possible futures. Two interventional initiatives grounded in multispecies accounts of more-than-human entanglements are outlined: first, ethnographic studies that contribute to emergent global conversations on universal human values; and second, the creation of collaborative spaces that enable cooperation across political, geographic and institutional divides. Together, these approaches position anthropology as a critical participant in negotiating optimistic and plural paths forward in an age of intelligent machines.