Neo-Enlightenment: Artificial Intelligence and Educational NBICS Reflection in the Context of Posthumanity

The article examines the transformation of higher education under the influence of artificial intelligence, digital learning environments, and NBICS convergence – the integration of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science, and the social sciences and humanities. At the heart of this transformation lies a fundamental tension between two conceptions of education: education as a practice devoted to cultivating autonomous, critically reflective subjects, and education as a mechanism for adapting learners to increasingly digital, AI-driven, and sociotechnical environments. The article conceptualizes education as a historically constituted interface of the Enlightenment: a mediating framework connecting human beings with knowledge, culture, and social practice. As education becomes increasingly subordinated to market imperatives and algorithmic forms of governance, however, its emancipatory and Enlightenment-oriented functions are placed at risk. Digitalization is shown to transform not only the transmission of knowledge but also the conditions under which knowledge is produced, validated, and legitimized. Big-data analytics and deep neural networks shift the epistemological emphasis from causal explanation (knowing why) to the identification of correlations (knowing what), thereby progressively enclosing rationality within the computational “black box.” These developments are accompanied by a crisis of the educational subject. The learner is increasingly conceived as a distributed, technologically mediated agent, while debates about education converge with the transhumanist project of human “enhancement” and technological reconfiguration within the NBIC paradigm. The author argues that transhumanism should not be regarded as the inevitable horizon of educational and technological development. In response to this technoscientific challenge, the article advances the project of a Neo-Enlightenment. This project entails a systematic reorientation of education away from the logic of calculative pragmatism and toward the values and structures of meaning that sustain subjective and intersubjective existence. The social-scientific and humanistic dimension of the NBICS complex should therefore be understood not as a counterweight to technological development, but as one of its essential conditions. Ultimately, the most fundamental source and object of innovation is neither a device nor a function, but the human being.

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