Digital Humanism: Technological Challenges to the Humanities

Abstract

Digitalization is not merely a technological trend but a radical shift in both anthropological and civilizational terms. The increasingly extensive and profound digital transformation of virtually all sociocultural practices that we are witnessing today is fundamentally reshaping the character of contemporary civilization. This process affects essential, if not constitutive, dimensions of human existence at different levels and across the various forms through which it is realized. In effect, digitalization is leading to a redefinition of the human mode of being. We are witnessing the emergence of a hybrid form of subjectivity: a biotechnologically and algorithmically augmented subject that is becoming integrated into the digital environment no longer merely as its user, but as part of that environment itself. This development therefore compels us to pose a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human in an algorithmically organized environment? What is at stake is not simply the prospect of robotization or the use of artificial intelligence technologies, but an ontological shift involving the emergence of a fundamentally different structure of existential and social experience.