Posthuman Subjects and AI Assemblages: The Ethics of More‑than‑Human Agency

The present paper proposes a posthuman ethical framework that unifies diverse forms of inquiry, namely, biology, AI research, political economy and moral philosophy around a single question, i.e., how should we understand agency when it is distributed across human, nonhuman and technical systems within the contemporary structure of advanced capitalism? Contemporary debates about AI ethics, environmental crisis and capitalist extraction often proceed in disciplinary isolation. AI ethics focuses on autonomy, bias and transparency in algorithms. Biology and ecology study symbiosis and planetary limits. Critical theory examines exploitation and necropolitics. Moral philosophy largely presupposes individual human agents as the basic unit of responsibility. This fragmentation obscures the fact that these phenomena form a single, entangled field of more‑than‑human agency.

The paper begins with posthumanism as a departure point, combining two key strands. First, Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthuman theory, which diagnoses a convergence of anti‑humanism and post‑anthropocentrism within cognitive capitalism. It further advances a zoe‑centred, neo‑materialist ethics of relational, embodied posthuman subjects. Second, N. Katherine Hayles’s idea of Integrated Cognitive Framework, which she proposes in Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts. It reconceives cognition as distributed across bacteria, plants, humans, and certain AI systems, defined by sensing, interpretation, adaptive response, anticipation, and learning within species‑specific Umwelten. These projects actively bridge literary theory, biology, technology studies and philosophy. The present paper systematises this bridge into a unified ethical paradigm.

It develops “Pothumanism” as a philosophical system that unifies these inquiries through three central concepts. First, AI assemblages as ethical units. Here, the primary unit of analysis is the zoe‑geotechno cognitive assemblage in which microbial ecologies, human bodies, AI systems, data infrastructures and environments jointly produce actions and effects.

Second is Posthuman subjectivity, where the subjects are understood as embodied informational knots within these assemblages. They are neither reducible to liberal human individuals nor to disembodied information, but constituted by ecological, technological and social relations. Third is more‑than‑human agency and responsibility, in which agency is theorised as distributed across biological and artificial cognitive systems. Ethical responsibility, therefore, shifts from the isolated intentions of individual actors to how power, risk and vulnerability are organised across assemblages.

Finally, the paper applies this unified framework to AI ethics and political philosophy. Instead of debating whether AI is “conscious” or “person‑like,” it asks which AI assemblages foster symbiotic, zoe‑centred justice and which engender exploitation or necropolitical control in advanced capitalism. Using Hayles’s notion of cognitive assemblages and Braidotti’s zoe‑centred ethics, it proposes criteria for evaluating AI systems in terms of their role in shared planetary cognition and their contribution to more‑than‑human flourishing or harm. In doing so, the paper offers a philosophically unified account of posthuman subjects and AI assemblages as the central ethical horizon for our time, showing how diverse lines of inquiry can be brought together within an ethics of more‑than‑human agency.