HUMAN AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS AI: A CYBORG MANIFESTO READING OF TED CHIANG'S THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS
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Abstract
This paper, through the lens of Cyborg Manifesto, explores the ethical responsibility and accountability of human agency towards artificially intelligent beings in the novella, Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. This study views the representation of AI beings in the novella as a relational entity which is dependent on human intervention, how they care about them and institutional and economic control created by humans. In the form of digients, or digital beings, Chiang questions the ethical and epistemological boundaries between artificial sentience and human cognition, examining whether personhood can be extended to beings whose consciousness has computationally emerged, and what will be their status in human societies. This work draws on the conceptual framework of Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, which is stated in her essay: “A Manifesto of Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in 1980s”, to emphasize that the boundaries between humans and digital beings are socially constructed and ethically consequential. Instead of reading the cyborg merely as a theoretical metaphor for boundary dissolution, the study argues that Chiang transforms Haraway's framework into a practical narrative of ethical responsibility. Viewing the novella through Cyborg Manifesto allows the study to trace how ethical meaning emerges from the AI-human relational system, rather than from technological autonomy. This paper places the novella, Lifecycle of Software Objects as a speculative ethical framework to reposition AI ethics and holds the human agency accountable in the age of AI. This study contributes to the critical discussion on AI ethics, post-humanism and the responsibility of human agency.
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