Humans and androids: humanism and after

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to test the challenge that so-called artificial intelligence in general, and androids in particular, pose to human self-understanding. But the prism through which this will be tested will be somewhat unusual: the (un)conceivability of educating androids, or rather, the analysis of a seemingly naive question: why don’t androids go to school? This question, however, is tendentious in an essential sense: it seems that the possibility of educating humans, education as schooling, could perhaps be considered the specific difference that separates them from androids and through which other human ’privileges’ are refracted. By asking ourselves the reasons why androids are excluded from the educational system, we are simultaneously standing in the position of thinking about the line of their demarcation from humans and defining humans. Disciplinarily speaking, the character or figure of the android – the non-human but still humanoid – will serve, perhaps better than others, to present an educationally intoned critique of humanism. In any case, it should become obvious that, along with changes in the understanding of man and the progress of techno-science, his attitude towards his artificial Other and its education has changed and is changing: from a cardinal aversion to the idea of machines, serviceable devices, soulless things, can attend school, through the fallback position that autonomous automatons can indeed learn, but that the scope of their learning is already programmed, so education in the usual humanistic sense of the word is impossible for them, to allowing them the opportunity to join our schools – for now, admittedly only in science fiction projections of the future.