THE ANTHROPOCENTRIC ABYSS: POSTHUMAN LOVE AND HUMAN ETHICS IN A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Abstract

Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) dramatizes the crisis of humanist morality through the figure of David, a child-android designed to love unconditionally. Interpreted through Herbrechter’s posthumanist lens, David’s flawless devotion reveals the instability of an anthropocentric moral order: his creators cannot reciprocate the very virtues they claim to cherish. Far from being deficiently human, David embodies empathy and loyalty with such perfection that he renders human shortcomings painfully visible. The paradox of the film lies in this ethical reversal: David succeeds too well at being “human,” and it is precisely this success that provokes rejection, cruelty, and abandonment. David’s fate exposes the price of safeguarding human exceptionalism: a deliberate denial of empathy and justice to the Other. In dramatizing this refusal, Spielberg lays bare a moral system that disintegrates when confronted with the greater ethical integrity of its own creation.