In the age of Artificial Intelligence, more accurately, the “age of AI Empire” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023), machines are no longer defined solely by their ability to process information. They are increasingly imagined as also capable of emotion, bodily awareness and interaction with the natural environment. This seminar examines the representation of embodied AI in literature and digital media focusing on the interrelationships between humans and the more-than-human alongside the growing emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge. Central to our analysis is how the increasing indistinctiveness unfolds within a global context still profoundly shaped by colonial histories and power asymmetries: a context of empire in the longue durée. 

Since the late 1990s and early 2000s the concept of “embodied artificial intelligence” (Brooks 1991; Clark 1997; Pfeifer and Scheier 1999) has engaged scholars in the humanities and social sciences especially within critical AI studies, posthumanism, and affect theory (e.g., Haraway 2016; Braidotti 2013, 2019a, 2019b; Hayles 2017). Drawing on that framework, as well as foundational texts such as Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (1987), we establish a theoretical foundation for examining AI embodiment, agency, and (the end of) the Anthropocene. 

Research has demonstrated that the infrastructures of AI are built on racialised data, asymmetrical flows of labour and capital, environmental harm, and the epistemicide of non-western ways of knowing and being (Benjamin 2019; Katz 2020; Madianou 2024; McQuillan 2022; Muldoon and Wu 2023). Anchored in postcolonial critiques of the techno-utopianism that often accompany AI discourse, we consider, e.g., whether embodied AI challenges human exceptionalism or instead reinscribes the dynamics of racial capitalism and colonial governance, and whether machines can participate in affective or ecological relations or remain instruments of techno-colonial control, surveillance, and extractivism. 

Our inquiry focuses on how literature and other digital media imagine AI through the lens of coloniality, racial capitalism (Robinson 1983), and epistemic justice (Fricker 2017). By analysing representations in literature and digital media, we examine whether embodied AI generates hyperrealities in which the human body - historically coded through colonial and racialised imaginaries - is rendered obsolete, as virtual agents simulate presence with increasing precision and affective resonance. Or, conversely, whether the persistence of the human form in AI technologies signals an attachment to a universalised, often Western model of subjectivity, one that is still imagined as central to narratives of progress and planetary survival. Either way, the question is political: who is being reproduced, who is being erased, and whose futurity is being encoded into the machine?