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This book asks whether there exists an essence exclusive to human beings despite their continuous enhancement – a nature that can serve to distinguish humans from artificially intelligent robots, now and in the foreseeable future. Considering what might qualify as such an essence, this volume demonstrates that the abstract question of ‘essentialism'underpins a range of social issues that are too often considered in isolation and usually justify ‘robophobia', rather than ‘robophilia', in terms of morality, social relations and legal rights. Any defence of human exceptionalism requires clarity about what property(ies) ground it and an explanation of why these cannot be envisaged as being acquired (eventually) by AI robots. As such, an examination of the conceptual clarity of human essentialism and the role it plays in our thinking about dignity, citizenship, civil rights and moral worth is undertaken in this volume. What is Essential to Being Human? will appeal to scholars of social theory and philosophy with interests in human nature, ethics and artificial intelligence.

The Assumption of Agency Theory revisits the Turing Test and examines what Turing's assessor knew. It asks important questions about how machines vis à vis humans have been characterized since Turing, and seeks to reverse the trend of looking closely at the machine by asking what humans know in interaction and how they know it. Building upon existing theories of philosophy of mind, this book shows not how humans operate theoretically, but how they use every day human skill to overcome knowledge barriers and understand each other through knowing themselves. Only once human interaction has been theorized in this way are machines able to be placed within it; when it is easier to understand what humans believe them to be. This book characterizes a non-human agent that shows itself in interaction but is distinct from human agency: an agent acting with us in our ongoing reproduction and transformation of structure. Turing predicted that at the end of the twentieth century, we would refer to thinking machines ‘without fear of contradiction'. The Assumption of Agency Theory shows how and why, even if we don't say it, we deal with machines every day as if they are thinking, acting agents.