While prophets of doom abound and multiply, over the last decades the humanities have proposed constructive critiques of the hierarchical structure of thought that supports the Eurocentric ideal of “man” as the allegedly universal measure of all things. Key motors of these productive lines of critique are feminist,^1,2 decolonial and Indigenous studies,^3,4 and environmentalism,^5,6 which criticise species hierarchy and anthropocentric exceptionalism. The post-human convergence brings these different lines of enquiry into new focus and urgency. Critical and creative at the same time, these interrogations of the limits of humanism and anthropocentrism are inspirational sources to redefine what may become of “humans” in the post-human era. These critical areas of study have also impacted the profile and function of the humanities in a globally linked, ethnically and culturally diverse, socially divided and technologically mediated world.

My argument assumes a preliminary consensus about this set of fraught conditions as constitutive of the post-human condition, due to the impact of technological mediation upon all living entities, driven by artificially intelligent infrastructure and self-learning, collaborative networks. These advances cannot fail to impact on human consciousness, our self-understanding and the way humans interact with one another, with non-human entities and with the technologies themselves. They also have the force to dramatically alter the knowledge foundations of traditional academic disciplines. This is felt especially in the field of the humanities, where the question “what do you mean by human?” has acquired greater urgency than ever.

The contemporary humanities have reacted with courage and imagination to the challenges of the post-human convergence, expanding into new fields of research and enquiry. They have become quite popular as the environmental humanities, the digital humanities, the biomedical or neural and the public humanities, to mention just a few. I simply refer to them as new humanities, knowing that their number is growing by the day.^7,8

A large proportion of these new fields adopt objects of study that address the post-human convergence of the environmental, technological and social emergencies. All of them agree that the new humanities must look for methods and approaches that are not part of their traditional toolbox. They have become interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary or post-disciplinary, thereby expanding the old distinction between the “two cultures”⁹ of the humanities and the natural sciences to the “three cultures”,¹⁰ which include the social sciences. They function by transversal team work across these fields.

Most of the new humanities intersect easily with the corporate sector, but also with the arts, media, popular culture and music. This is especially true of the digital humanities and all AI-driven sectors, which tend to partake of the consensus about the advantages of enhancement of both human and non-human entities. Some of the new humanities intersect with the tradition of critical thinking which includes feminist, environmentalist, decolonial and Indigenous studies areas. They combine the critical assessment of humanism — and the European scientific tradition based upon it — with a critical analysis of anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism in relation to other species. And they prove capable of responding to the post-human challenges by producing significant innovative perspectives.¹¹

This takes us to the next question: what institutional forms can the new post- Humanities take? What social, economic, legal, scientific and academic values should they embrace? What kind of infrastructures — digital, financial, environmental, social and political — can build new social horizons of hope and trust today? How can the contemporary humanities help to redesign them and repurpose them in equitable, democratic and affirmative ways?

I recommend that the new humanities focus on how to design and uphold what I call affirmative ethics. Affirmative ethics involves a practical effort to develop collectively: trust and care in all techno-fields; environmental responsibility; intergenerational solidarity; collaborative digital democracy and accountability; social justice; sustainable societies with global healthcare and education; civil rights for all, especially the social minorities; and, of course, freedom of press, of thought, of dissent and of critical enquiry.

In order to achieve such urgent aims, the humanities can train our social imaginaries and help us think beyond the present. This is especially important when the present is experienced as negative, in view of the climate crisis, flagrant injustices, excessive concentration of wealth and cruel social hierarchies presently produced by the unregulated economics of the post-human convergence. The masses of dispossessed and left-behind citizens have not reacted kindly to their exclusion from the techno-bonanza that is benefiting a few global firms. Consequently, social anger and disenchantment have become widespread in liberal democracies.

To make things worse, populist political movements have built their programmes on exploiting this disenchantment, promoting cynicism, rage, ignorance and racism, and often directing them against the old democratic consensus. Populists, left and right of the political spectrum, exploit the generalised dismay and anxiety and exacerbate it by scapegoating stigmatised social categories such as immigrants, the LBGTQ+ community, childless women and intellectuals — in short, the “others”. Moreover, populists tend to be obscurantist and anti-science, for example by supporting anti‑vaccine movements. This happens at a time when scientific research is booming because of great technological advances but is also becoming more privatised in neoliberal economies. Many political movements today are attacking the institution of the university as a whole, and the field of the humanities in particular, giving them a bad press as too left-wing-leaning or as socially irrelevant. Humanities scholars spend a disproportionate amount of time defending their sheer existence.

So, what is to be done? I would begin by challenging two interlinked discursive tactics. The first is to resist the separation of the environmental aspects of the post-human convergence from the technological, and the separation of both of these from the social. We need to challenge this new segregation of knowledge-production practices. The second is to dispel the aura of historical ineluctability that surrounds the new technologies, which spreads the message that everything is already played out.

It is important to stress instead that both practices and narratives about our post-human futures remain open-ended. A process of transition as intricate as the transformation of the human by the intersection of complex structural factors — technology, the environment and social polarisations — can only be approached as work in progress. As yet, there can be no foregone conclusion about the kind of post-human subjects we are in the process of becoming. The post-human convergence is rather a working hypothesis that requires public discussions and open dialogues, a plurality of perspectives and constant vigilance about the new power relations engendered by the scale and speed of contemporary technological, environmental and social transformations.

The key question for researchers in the new humanities is ethical and political: what are we asking of our fellow citizens? Do we push them to think like philosophers, engineers, utopian writers and artists? How can we prevent them from falling out of love with democracy and its rules and protocols? Further, how can we defeat the fatal attraction of pseudoscience and fake news? And the persistent, divisive impact of AI-driven falsehoods and manipulations? We all must meet the challenge of complexity and of speculative conceptual thinking — at a time when simplifications and massive lies seem to rule.

In other words, there is an urgent need to invent a new nexus between research, society, media and politics. How can we democratise the current scientific debates, considering their complexity and density? How can we help our fellow-citizens to take part in these debates in an accountable manner? If the issue at stake is how to redesign the framework for an enhanced humanity and an augmented planet, how can we break the news to our fellow citizens in an affirmative manner? How can we deal with the reactions of dismay, anxiety and fear these changes inevitably entail?

Nothing in the course of the events we are going through is inevitable or outside the grasp of historical agency. There is not even a consensus about the profile of the new technologies. I am with those who think that contemporary Big Tech — including Google and Open AI — have enacted a rather narrow implementation of the potential of these new technologies. They made them functional to a rather old-fashioned principle: the automation of labour. The difference is that nowadays AI is automating also cognitive and cerebral labour, but the idea is the same; the generative and speculative potential of these technologies remains neglected.

The new humanities can help here, reconnecting us to the pure virtuality of the technologies: to their speculative experimental core, their capacity to become anything, not just work machines bent on profit. To reconnect technologies to their profound gratuitousness is a creative gesture that turns them into open portals to new visions and alternative social imaginaries. Redesigning the social imaginary is what the humanities do best, mostly through collaborative experimentations with alternative usages and functions of the imagination, resting on an ancient cultural and literary tradition. We need blueprints and visionary plans for the enhancement technologies that have been developed to increase environmental care and generative practices towards a new political economy for technological societies. The political scenario must also be enriched, now that capitalism and democracy have loosened their historical bonds. Can we imagine a digital social democracy for the 21st century, based on collaboration and solidarity between enhanced entities of the human and non-human type?

I propose that we construct affirmative ethics as a social project. We need to revive the critical function of thinking adequately about our conditions as a communal practice, making thinking cool again and rehabilitating the role of the understanding as a collective ethical practice. Such a practice is backed by lifelong retraining and education programmes for all, in a spirit of social solidarity that embraces the widespread sense of dismay rightly felt by citizens.

The answer is in the doing, in the praxis of composing alliances and collaborative connections, and in engaging in broad discussions about the transformations that we are part of: we who care enough for our shared futures and who want to rethink ourselves democratically — together.