Artificial intelligence emerged as a formal field in 1956, gained rapid momentum in the 1980s and has now advanced to a stage where it can process highly complex data with remarkable precision. Its integration across business, healthcare, education, transportation, industry and entertainment demonstrates its deep influence on contemporary life. This technological rise has also challenged traditional humanism which positions humans at the centre of value and meaning and has opened space for post humanist thought. Posthumanism argues that humans are no longer unique or central but exist as one component within a wider network of intelligent and non-human actors including AI, plants, animals and digital systems. It further suggests that the boundaries separating humans and artificial intelligence are gradually dissolving. This study neither fully accepts posthumanism nor rejects it outright. Instead, it acknowledges the concepts that hold theoretical validity while critically questioning those that lack ethical, philosophical or neurological grounding. The research argues that although AI displays advanced computational abilities, it cannot be considered equivalent to human beings due to the absence of consciousness, subjective experience, embodied cognition and moral agency dimensions supported by neurological and ethical reasoning. The paper is structured into two key sections that guide the analysis. The first establishes the conceptual foundation by examining how posthumanism reshapes the human–AI relationship, especially in debates on personhood, agency and embodiment. The second offers an ethical interpretation and conceptual analysis that explains why the claim of human–AI equality is philosophically unsound. Using a theoretical, conceptual and literature-based methodology, the study highlights subtle conceptual gaps in extreme interpretations of posthumanism, particularly the assumption that AI’s computational intelligence can be placed on the same ontological level as human consciousness. Overall, the research provides a balanced and refined understanding of the evolving human–AI relationship within a post humanist framework.
Momin et al. (Sat,) studied this question.