Humans have always lived with ethically significant others. We have found ways to be in conversation with near-humans, quasi-humans and super-humans even if we have had to create them ourselves and endow them with life. How do these encounters challenge our ethical intuitions? Is morality relative? And are we truly on the cusp of a radical transformation now because of AI?
In Animals, Robots and Gods, acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of ethics, defined less by the structure of our minds or society's pressures, and more by our interactions with those around us. Drawing on ground-breaking research by fieldworkers around the world, he takes us into the underpinnings of our moral universe as we explore the contact zones between humans and their interlocutors: from self-driving cars to unseen spirits, dogs to cyborgs, hunters to shamans.
Along the way we investigate the ethical dilemmas of South Asian animal rights activists, Balinese cockfighters, Japanese robot fanciers -- even macho cowboys. We find ourselves pushed further when we meet a hunter in the Yukon who explains his prey generously gives itself up to him, a cancer sufferer in Thailand who sees his tumour as a reincarnated ox, a Brazilian spirit medium who becomes another person altogether when in a state of possession, or an computer that (or should we say "who"?) gets you to confess your anxieties as if you were on the psychiatrist's couch.
With charm, wit and insight, Keane offers us a better understanding of our own doubts and certainties, showing how centuries of conversations between us and non-humans inform our conceptions of morality, and will continue to guide us in the age of AI and beyond.
