In Will Oremus’s opinion, the concern about the rapid pace of change in Artificial Intelligence (Al)is not due to the fear of Al surpassing human intelligence. Instead, it arises from humans exploiting Al to outsmart and manipulate each other, posing challenges for unprepared institutions. As Al gains perceived power, there is a risk of assigning it tasks that it is not equipped to handle. This application of Al as a tool of misinformation is something happening now – and in a volatile, polarized political world, it can do harm to society and culture. While not yet a fully-functioning ‘equal’ to humans, current iterations of Al are still powerful tools that can be used maliciously.
Posthumanism is a philosophical and cultural movement that critically examines and challenges traditional western humanism, which often places humans at the centre of the universe and emphasizes human exceptionalism. It challenges the notion that only humans possess value, consciousness, and agency. Posthumanism, as a philosophical and cultural movement, offers a diverse approach to address the challenges posed by Al and advancing technology. Its strength lies in embracing a variety of ideas and perspectives to navigate the complexities surrounding contemporary technology. Different groups of people from different cultures in different countries around the world can process the issues Al brings to the forefront, and this diversity of perspectives can better address the complex issues that Al presents to humanity in the present moment.
Posthumanism is a collection of systems of thought that can work through complexities facing human beings from a variety of standpoints. Perhaps in this way, similar structures can be seen in how some Al programs, particularly chatbots, operate and how a successful posthumanism might also operate. The key is in the programming – that is, the parameters that Al is given to sort through information to come up with accurate results.
Philosophical posthumanism provides a framework for thinking about the world not through humanistic universal truths, but by allowing for all beings to have agency and exist in their own ways of being. As humans open up to a multitude of cultural experiences and experience new ways of being and becoming, that appreciation can begin to extend to other forms of life that already coexist with humans (be they plant or animal), along with potential nonhuman beings and environments.
Humans need to learn how to behave, react, and operate in a shared world – a world where they may no longer have the kind of dominance embraced by western humanism, which tends to dominate the globe; this needs to be understood philosophically, scientifically, culturally, and personally by the individuals that make up our global community – along with trillions of other living species, and non-living objects, on this earth. Truly sharing this world is something humans need to understand. Humans do not understand this, however, and the rest of the living and non-living world suffers as a result. If humanity continues to not understand how to share this earth in the future, humanity as a species will be the one to suffer.
The relation between humans and technology is less a simple tool-user pairing than a complex, reciprocal restructuring of agency, knowledge and power. Will Oremus’s passage captures this tension succinctly: the danger of artificial intelligence (AI), he suggests, is not that it will magically outthink us, but that humans will “exploit AI to outsmart and manipulate each other,” assigning it tasks for which institutions are unprepared. The text’s discussion of posthumanism — a movement that “challenges the notion that only humans possess value, consciousness, and agency” and stresses plural cultural perspectives — supplies a corrective to purely instrumental readings. Taken together, the passage implies three interlocking claims: (1) technologies extend and transform capacities rather than merely serving neutral ends; (2) the social harms we currently see are produced by human incentives, designs and institutions; and (3) a philosophical account that widens our moral imagination (posthumanism) while attending to structures of power and knowledge (as Foucault does) best explains both the causes and possible remedies.
Posthumanism, as the passage frames it, decouples moral and ontological significance from a single, sovereign human subject and insists on plural standpoints for making sense of technological disruption. This matters practically because AI systems are not autonomous moral agents but configured assemblages: they operate according to “the programming — that is, the parameters that AI is given to sort through information to come up with accurate results.” If we accept that programming encodes priorities, omissions and value judgments, then technology becomes an index of social choices. From this perspective, the relation between humans and technology is an ecology of co-constitution: human cultures shape technological parameters, and those parameters in turn reshape human practices, expectations and institutions. The text’s insistence that “different groups of people from different cultures” can process AI’s challenges highlights a causal point: epistemic narrowness in design — homogeneous datasets, monocultural teams, uni-directional development incentives — produces predictable harms (biased outputs, exclusion, cultural flattening). Posthumanism therefore reframes responsibility: not only must individual designers or users be judged, but the social arrangements that determine what gets programmed, for whom, and with what priorities must be interrogated.
Complementing this ontological reorientation is a causal, instrumental diagnosis that Oremus intimates: AI’s harms arise because humans use powerful tools in contexts of competition, polarization and weak institutional safeguards. The passage observes that AI “as a tool of misinformation is something happening now” and warns that the perceived power of AI leads to risky assignments of tasks beyond its capacities. Causally, this is a chain: economic and political incentives favor tools that scale persuasion and attention; designers optimize for engagement or profit; platforms deploy opaque algorithms; bad actors weaponize generated content; and institutions — built for slower, more deliberative problems — fail to adapt. The proximate causes are therefore human and structural: incentives, opacity and scale. AI amplifies choices rather than replaces them. Deepfakes, targeted disinformation and algorithmic amplification are not metaphysical failures of technology but predictable outcomes of incentive structures and engineering decisions. Understanding the human–technology relation thus requires attending to the mechanisms by which design decisions and market forces transmute technical affordances into social effects.
To understand why institutions are “unprepared” and why harms can be diffuse and systemic, Michel Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge and postmodern modalities of governance is especially illuminating. For Foucault, knowledge and power are not separate domains but mutually constitutive: regimes of knowledge produce subjects and practices that instantiate power, and power shapes what counts as legitimate knowledge. AI exemplifies this dynamic: algorithmic classifications, predictive scores and automated recommendations instantiate novel epistemic regimes that reorder what is visible, knowable and actionable. In a Foucauldian frame, AI technologies are technologies of power — instruments that enact surveillance, classification and normalisation at vast scale. They produce new subjectivities (the “datafied” individual), reorganize populations through metrics and risk profiles, and create governance practices that operate through subtle modes of control rather than overt coercion. Foucault’s reflections on postmodernity — the dispersion of power into networks and institutions, the erosion of master narratives and the proliferation of local epistemic practices — explain why centralized institutions struggle: power now circulates through heterogeneous networks of corporations, code, users and sensors. Consequently, harms emerge not from a single villain but from distributed micro-powers that normalize certain behaviors, marginalize others, and make countervailing resistance more difficult without new forms of civic and institutional capacity.
If these diagnoses are correct, remedies must be structural as well as ethical. The passage’s advocacy of plural cultural perspectives points toward practical steps: diversify design teams and datasets; institutionalize participatory and contextualised testing; and insist that “programming parameters” be transparent and contestable. At the level of incentives, governments and civil society must reshape economic rewards so that scale and speed do not automatically trump accuracy, fairness and public goods. Foucauldian insight suggests another necessary move: create countervailing epistemic institutions — independent auditors, public-interest knowledge infrastructures, civic education — that can interrogate algorithmic classifications and the power they encode. Finally, a posthumanist-normative posture invites humility: to “learn how to behave, react, and operate in a shared world” is to accept limits, redistribute authority, and cultivate plural standards for technological flourishing.
In short, the human–technology relation should be understood as reciprocal, historically situated and politically inflected. AI does not act alone; it mirrors and magnifies choices embedded in programming, markets and institutions. Posthumanist widening of moral attention helps us see the plurality of stakeholders and beings affected, while Foucauldian analysis explains how new epistemic practices instantiate diffuse power and why institutions are often lagging. Together they imply that whether technology becomes a force for enrichment or a vector of harm will hinge less on hypothetical future superintelligences and more on how we design, govern and contest the knowledge–power configurations we are now creating. If humanity fails to do that, as the passage warns, it will ultimately be humanity that suffers.