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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Mads Larsen has a PhD (2022) and an MFA (2018) from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published more than three dozen articles. In his first research monograph, Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder: The Evolution of Modern Mating Ideologies, Dating Dysfunction, and Demographic Collapse (Routledge, 2024, open access), Larsen applies evolutionary theory to eight centuries of Nordic literature to illuminate today’s fertility crisis. This article on Dante is part of a project in which he examines four millennia of world literature to investigate how communities use fiction to rethink their understanding of universality during times of crisis.

Abstract

The emergence of artificial superintelligence (ASI) seems to require that our humanist beliefs be superseded by something akin to dataism, the posthumanist creed popularized by Yuval Harari. To explore how such thinking could influence our views on otherness and cross-cultural cooperation, this article compares three works of fiction that appear to bookend the humanist era. Dante’s protohumanist Divine Comedy (ca. 1308–20) argues for a global empire built on a universalism that contradicts the Eurocentricity of later humanisms. The Swedish TV series Real Humans (2012–14) and its British remake, Humans (2015–18), argue for an ASI-driven empire built on algorithmic universality, an ontology made possible by new technologies. Like Dante, the two TV series portray benign manipulation of human cognition as a necessity for individual and social flourishing. Such submission to the certainty of an assumed superior being, however, could be far more perilous with respect to a machine than an imagined god.

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