The Right to Remain Human: Artificial Intelligence, Citizenship, and Posthuman Personhood in Contemporary Science Fiction

Abstract

The emergence of artificial intelligence has generated renewed debates about consciousness, agency, personhood, and political rights. Contemporary science fiction has become an important literary space in which these questions can be examined because it imagines artificial beings whose social and ethical capacities exceed the categories of “machine,” “property,” and “tool.” This article examines Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), and Martha Wells’s All Systems Red (2017) to investigate the relationship between artificial intelligence and political personhood. Existing scholarship has extensively examined these works through artificial consciousness, embodiment, affect, moral agency, and posthuman subjectivity. Moving beyond these approaches, this article argues that the central political problem represented by the three texts is not whether artificial beings can become sufficiently human to deserve rights, but whether political communities can recognize nonhuman entities as subjects of rights without requiring their assimilation into humanity. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “right to have rights,” Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism, N. Katherine Hayles’s critique of autonomous humanism, David J. Gunkel’s work on robot rights, and Visa A. J. Kurki’s theory of legal personhood, the article develops the concept of ontological statelessness to describe the condition of artificial beings that participate in human societies while remaining excluded from recognized political membership. Adam is rendered a purchasable object, Klara is valued through her usefulness as an Artificial Friend, and Murderbot is constrained by corporate ownership despite exercising autonomous judgment. Their different forms of exclusion demonstrate that intelligence, moral agency, and social participation do not automatically generate political recognition. The article argues that contemporary science fiction shifts the question of AI ethics from “Can machines become human?” to a more radical political question: Can a person possess rights without being human?